


Joe and Nicky's Believe It or Not!

by appalachiansnail



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: 1950s, Bathing/Washing, Circumcision Festivals, Elephants, Established Relationship, First Time Bottoming, Gardens & Gardening, Hurt/Comfort, Internal Monologue, Istanbul, Jealousy, M/M, Ottoman Empire, Slice of Life, Vietnam, Voyeurism, Whales, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:40:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25271782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appalachiansnail/pseuds/appalachiansnail
Summary: Joe and Nicky tell Nile stories that seem too strange to be lies, but too wondrous to be true.orStrange, luminous scenes from a 1000-year marriage.Each chapter is a stand alone story.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 86
Kudos: 815





	1. out on the sea, we'd be forgiven

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter one is mostly angst and chapter two is mostly sex. Choose accordingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not Vietnamese and have never been to Vietnam. I tried my best to portray it respectfully! Please don't take it seriously but if there are any issues let me know and I will address ASAP.
> 
> Title from "On the Sea" by Beach House.

"Like, by himself?" Nile asked, incredulously.

"He's a kindhearted man. It's what I love about him." Joe snickered.

"You're lying," Nile said.

Joe put one hand over his heart and he widened his eyes slightly, affecting sincerity.

"I couldn't make this up. It was in the early morning, he was walking by the beach and he saw this huge whale lying there on its side, beached, maybe moaning a little, and so many emotions came over him, my sweet, gentle man, he was so moved, that he just leapt into the ocean, convinced that he could save this grand leviathan all on his o-"

Caught up in performing his story, Joe stood up, gesturing wildly. Nicky threw a water bottle at him.

"I was trying to get the attention of some fishermen," Nicky scowled. 

Nile gave him a skeptical look. She had a repertoire of them now.

"And none of these fishermen tried to help you when you started drowning?"

He didn't drown. He was from a port city. He had _some_ pride.

He had woken up that morning at 5AM, when it was still dark. He couldn't sleep off anger. It was one of his personality flaws.

To be alive is to be a contradiction, but immortality makes it a hundred times worse. Time, pure and injected straight into the vein, had a way of tying every feeling back on itself. It blurred the memory but left the shape wedged uncomfortably in his mind. It laced his body with emotion, pulled tight like a tripwire. What might appear to someone as apathy was more like paralysis, a weightedness to even daily activities. It was all heavy. It was hard just to move oneself.

This is how Joe would say it: to be this old is to feel too much about too many things. To be this old is to love and loathe and fear and crave and abhor at once and to still know that each of those words pales in comparison to how I feel.

This is how Andy would say it: even ancient relationships have problems you can't fuck away.

He sat up and then winced. Last night, they were frustrated with one another, but still wanted. Too impatient to fuck, they half-wrestle-half-jerked themselves off. When Joe slammed him into the wall with his shoulder, one hand fumbling with his belt, the other gripping the back of his head, Nicky knew to tilt his chin up, to expect the cool clamp of his lover's teeth. When he pressed both hands firmly against Joe's chest, he felt the familiar tensing, and then releasing of muscle as Joe allowed himself to be thrown onto the bed. He saw the controlled looseness of the tendons of his lover's neck as his head thudded against the wall, paint chips falling into dark curly hair.

It was intimately familiar. It was cloying.

At this time of day, the night air was tinted with bitterness, ocean air cooled by the darkness. Their sparse room was bathed in blueish light. They had closed the window the night before but it had come undone and a few bugs had gotten in.

Four years out, they were still recovering. People were calling the war World War II now, declaring it a sequel; the possibility of a trilogy felt implied.

Andy knew where they were and they knew she was somewhere in Australia, somewhere dry. The dreams they had of one another were less clear now that they had found each other. Booker was somewhere with trees. Joe said somewhere cold.

He pulled on a cotton collared shirt and a pair of pleated pants. He couldn't find his sandals in the darkness, but he tripped over a pair of Joe's leather shoes in the doorway of the bathroom and put those on instead. His feet would be hot, but he was too drowsy to care.

In the frame of the front door, he paused, amusing himself by trying to identify the exact point at which the hot dense outside air collided with the slightly-less-hot, slightly-less-dense air inside their house. They had a fan in their living room. He leaned forward, then back, narrowing his mind to focus exclusively on the sensation of the wind brushing the base of his neck each time he swayed back. In his mind's eye, he saw the air blowing from the fan as a visible stream, and he imagined the way his body bounced gently against it. 

This kind of meditative attention to his body, his senses, and his experience, was a hard-earned skill. Unlike Joe, he had always been maybe too cerebral. Joe lived immediate to the world, and felt without reservation. Stretched out across the centuries of life, this trait of spontaneity became a constant, something that Nicky found stabilizing. 

His own instinct to sit outside himself tended to cause uncertainty to slowly grow in him like a tumor. His need to pause, analyze and reconsider himself metastasized over decades, gnawing away at him until he could no longer live with the voices in his head that echoed until their distortion rendered them incoherent and deafening.

They were staying in a small fishing village, a few kilometres outside one of the big port cities on the South China coast. Their old, mildewed house was one of a neat row lined up down the path to the beach. They were renting it from a couple had moved into the city for the summer to take care of their grandson. The couple's son-in-law, who worked for a French trading company, had been pulled into fighting up north and wouldn't be coming home for some time. 

In the fall, Nicky knew they would have to leave. It was only a matter of time before the conflict between independence fighters and the French would reach this area.

He walked along the dirt road. An odd assortment of trees extended along both sides, a mix of native species, particularly aggressive weeds and the remainders of various beautification efforts by different colonial initiatives. Coy palm trees swayed gently against the stiffly trembling leaves of the taller pines. Small flowers, mostly white and yellow, dotted the bushes. In the afternoons, local kids would hang from the longer branches until they dropped into the dense and soft underbrush.

He and Joe weren't fighting per se. He kicked a rock into the grass irritably. Funny, that their relationship had begun with all-out physical conflict. In the intermittent centuries, they had fought every way there was, furious shouting matches, months of brutal passive-aggressive sniping, private badmouthing to Andy, vicious wrestling matches, angry animalistic sex, rock-paper-scissors. Still, they found new ways to hit the soft tissue beneath the armor.

Since they had left the Pacific war, he had felt unsettled. Andy and Booker probably hadn't noticed, eager as they were to disappear off to wherever they went between missions, but no matter how he tried to hide it, he couldn't deceive Joe.

Joe had been sweet. Too sweet. He moved the way they moved in the field, with absolute confidence and 900 years of familiarity. He picked the right location (Vietnam: warm, near the ocean, rainy but pleasant, food that was only mildly spicy and often sweet), he did the right things (bought him expensive old books about history and philosophy, blew him in the mornings, stroked the back of his neck with his thumb), he said the right things (words of affection in the various languages they shared) and he did them all in the right amounts (not too often, and in the moments when Nicky wasn't paying attention).

Joe gave him space, but not too much space and he was unerringly patient. At times it made Nicky feel physically sick. The confidence Joe had, the degree to which he understood Nicky, the way each of his actions seemed to say: _I have seen you for a thousand years and I see you now, as you are. I will wait out this storm with you, the man I loved then and I still love now._

But he didn’t feel like himself, and strangely, he couldn’t remember what “himself” would even feel like.

And of course, Joe was undoubtedly right. He was the love of Nicky’s life, however long it would be. To be loved by Joe was as necessary as breathing. To be loved by Joe was suffocating. He felt both these things to be true. The dread felt unbearable. And it made him cruel.

In their small, sweltering apartment in the city, they had poked and stabbed at one another. Nicky had stumbled upon a new weapon; skitting back and forth between affection and coldness. A gift Joe procured in the early morning might be met with blunt indifference but later that evening Nicky would take his lover into his mouth with barely restrained desperation.

One morning, he would come up behind Joe just as he bit into a peach, catching the juice with his tongue as it dropped down his lover’s wrist, licking up and up. The next morning, he stalked out without a word and spent the whole day at the river markets, sulking over a piece of rich green silk, pausing to pet a stray dog. His heart was restless and instead of restraining it, he followed it.

He took quiet pleasure in the faint steeling of Joe's eyes when he slid open the window to find him smoking on the balcony. The pleasure that mutated into guilt (he scrubbed down the wicker chair to get rid of the smell of smoke), which mutated into frustration (tossing his cigarettes into the trash loudly while Joe was nearby) and then dulled back into restlessness (the cycle began anew).

Joe met it all with an equanimity that became more and more pointed with time. Every deliberately casual comment about damp socks on the armchair was met with a serene smile. He never raised his voice but kept it almost too level. In the early mornings, when the thickness in his chest drove Nicky out of bed, Joe came and sat with him silently on their front step, saying nothing but imposing with the kindness of his presence. When Nicky woke him from an afternoon nap, lapping at the sweat on his neck as he rutted against the other man’s hip, Joe just kissed him deliberately, slowly, refusing to match his lover's state of arousal.

The game became more and more subtle; if an almost imperceptible clench of Joe's jaw was a win, pulling Joe's arm around his waist as they sank into sleep was a kind of surrender.

When their neighbor in the city mentioned that her parents were looking for a house-sitter for the summer, Joe had leapt at the idea.

Things felt slightly better out here, if only because the shoreline extended for miles each way; one day Nicky walked south and Joe walked north, and the next day they swapped. The sea was familiar for them both, and they tended to seek it out when they had free time.

The fishermen set out into the sea at 2 in the morning each night in the summer and their footprints were still visible on the path, round and layered one on top of another like fish scales. As he rounded the corner, the dirt gave way to sand and he felt his feet sink softly into the beach. Already, the space between his feet and the bottom of the shoe was becoming grainy.

At first, he was looking at the mismatched laces on Joe's cheap shoes and assumed the large, dark object out of the corner of his eye was a boat that had come in early. But it was misshapen and the night was eerily silent. More than that, it was enormous; if he laid down beside it, he wouldn't even cover half its body length and the arch of its back was as high as his chin.

As he walked toward it, his eyes adjusted and from within the darkness, he could make out the sharp red gashes that ran up and down its left side. Its eyes were wide open, dark and glinting but coated with a milky white film. Its skin was inky black, but mottled with patches of grey and white like liquid stains on asphalt. The wind was blowing gently. Every once in a while, waves of pale sand would be blown off, like ghostly vapors that clung briefly to the body before disappearing. In the half-light of the moon, against the shifting waves, he swore he saw it breathing, saw its back rise and fall, slow and labored. 

He was close enough now to touch it. He reached out and put one hand on its side. The skin was wet and slick to touch but the longer he held it there, the more clearly he could feel the heat of muscle buried deep within. The air around the whale seemed thinner, as though it was drinking in the breath that surrounded it. Beneath his fingers, the life was slowly draining out of this animal. Pale white scars crisscrossed its skin, like veins of marble, differing in depth of color by age, marks of hundreds of oceanic voyages.

He heard a cry and looked to his right; further down the beach, a woman had broken into a run toward them. She was waving her hands wildly at something past him. He turned and saw a cluster of boats a few hundred feet to his left, fishermen regrouping after finishing their work. They were too far to hear her. 

He started to shout, not even words, just noises. Though his throat thickened with urgency, his mind was clear and empty; he began running toward the water without even thinking, pumping his knees high and feeling the sand spray against his ankles. Briefly, he registered the way his toes squelched against wet leather as water filled his slightly loose shoes, the tide rising up to meet him affectionately. He could make out the fishermen now, their broad backs turned to him, their heads hanging low as they sorted their fish into buckets, bodies moving together like a many-limbed machine.

The waterline was halfway up his calf when a rush of water hit him from behind. One of his feet caught on something underwater and he was plunged forward into the water. He knew almost immediately that he was in a rip current from the way the ocean rose up around him, pushing his shoulders down and his head forward.

As the cold sea water enveloped him, he took a gasping breath that was thick with salt. He had to cough immediately, big bubbles that burst against his nose and eyes. His pants and shoes were heavy underwater. He scraped the tip of his left shoe against his right ankle desperately, trying to rid himself of the extra weight. As he tried to tread water with his left arm, he jerked his chin up to catch a breath and waved his right arm frantically.

He heard shouting and knew that though it had only been a few seconds, the current had brought him close enough to the boats to be seen. His left shoe came off and he immediately started trying to shake off his right. Tucking his knee to his chest, he took a deep breath and then curled himself so that he could reach his remaining shoe with both hands. He wrenched his foot out and flipped over, floating on his back.

As a child, the sailors in Genova had taught the children about rip currents on the beach, so he was not afraid. The waves were moving slightly more gently now, and he knew that sooner or later, they would deposit him past the line where the waves broke. His pants were smothering his legs. He felt for the cold smoothness of his belt buckle under water and undid it with slightly numb fingers. He felt the fabric of his pants bunching at his ankles as they fell away.

Angling himself perpendicular to the direction of the current, he swam a few strong breaststrokes, kicking his feet out tightly. He felt the water change around him as he broke free from the narrow width of current. The salt was stinging his eyes but he could make out a pair of fishermen waving their arms at him and they seemed to be pulling closer.

He turned his back to the shore, laid back and began to kick lazily, pulling his arms around him in a circular motion, a kind of toddler's backstroke. Up above him, the dark blue of night collided with the blushing orange of the sun peeking its head over the horizon, creating a beautiful gradient: imperious purple, like silky and luxurious Chinese robes, faded into the pale lilac of a corsage, wrapped around a pale arm hanging lazily out of a hotel window, into the magenta of the proud flamingos that glided over the Bolivian salt flats, then the burnt gold of a looming cliff-side in what was now Nevada, that they spent two months climbing.

Stars dotted the sky; each softly pulsing light looked almost embedded, as though they were slowly sinking back into the velvet night. The ocean beneath him and the sky above him were all that he could see and feel. If he tried hard enough he could imagine himself much further from land, adrift somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, nothingness extending around him for miles and miles and miles.

As the sound of the motor approached and the water around him trembled, he closed his eyes and felt his body, his small body, rise and fall; the gentle, almost imperceptible trembling of an enormous ocean that stretched across the whole world.

Their neighbor woke Joe up halfway through shaving his beard. Their career necessitated that they be functional almost immediately after waking, but it wasn't in Joe's nature to be fully conscious until mid-day at the earliest. He got a remarkable amount of mileage out of his half-awake state though; Nicky often talked about struggling to break out of a chokehold for fifteen minutes after he knocked Joe unconscious the first time they met.

Nicky always told most romantic stories about their time together.

The woman who lived next door to them, who must have been about sixty, took to them right away. The window in their kitchen opened up to the narrow strip of grass between their homes where she cooked on her gas stove, which she was very proud of. In the mornings, her husband and son came back with the fishing boats at six or seven. When Nicky and Joe were having breakfast, she was often preparing a recovery meal.

The first time she came to the window, she peeked her head in quickly. When she realized they saw her, she jerked back out of instinct, then, realizing the pointlessness of hiding, leaned forward again, waving at them a little sheepishly. They waved back, amused.

The next day, she came back, hovering awkwardly at the window. When they came, smiling amenably but squinting slightly in the morning light, she started talking eagerly. Neither of them spoke much Vietnamese, and certainly not enough to understand her dialect, which was much younger than them and complex, filled with the influence of the many cultures that collided along the coast.

It didn't matter though; it was a joy just to look at her, physically older than them but much younger in experience, happy every morning to breathe in the thick summer air and deeply attentive to her daily experience. She was excited to meet new people and clearly was used to chatting with her neighbors in the morning, to feel the presence of others as she started her day.

Most mornings, she would come over and cheerfully offer them a little piece of peanut or a chunk of wet bittermelon through the window. They would pick it off her wooden spatula with their fingers, wincing slightly at the heat. It was always delicious and they would try and find ways of expressing it in their broken, old-fashioned Vietnamese and big gestures and she would laugh, loud and pleased.

On the days when things were good, her and Nicky would have whole conversations and Joe would smile, watching Nicky lean out the window, his eyes watering from the thick scent of food cooking and the heat of the gas stove. In another world, she would have had a career on the Food Network; she would carefully show him each ingredient before she added it into the pan, acting out the way she cut the vegetables, the order in which she added the sauces, the way she tasted the food at different points and adjusted the flavor.

After breakfast, Nicky would pull out a notebook and record the recipe of the morning dutifully, describing with great care the ingredients he didn't recognize so that he could track down their names later. Many years later, Joe would still think of it every once in a while, when Nicky was scrounging for a channel guide to find a cooking show he wanted to watch, and it would make him happy.

On the bad days, Nicky would be gone by the time she came by. Joe would try what she offered and he would smile and she would laugh, but it wasn't the same. Joe could cook, but he preferred to eat and Nicky liked to cook and Joe liked to eat what Nicky cooked, even when it wasn't good (though it usually was). But Nicky had been cooking only sporadically recently.

It always took them time to settle back into a sense of shared life. When they were working, they were a unit and Nicky felt like an extension of himself. But during breaks, which were getting longer and longer, they became two people living with, and in a sense, against each other.

Every time, they had to rediscover who they were in relation to each other and who they were when the other wasn't looking. At work, they were always in contact with one another, somehow. On breaks, he would catch himself in the middle of a walk through the city alone, reaching for Nicky when he wasn't there; it would leave him feeling so disoriented that he almost forgot who he was. He would wake up and not know exactly where Nicky was.

Inevitably, it was always harder for one of them, but it had never been this hard with Nicky. Their last job was over a year ago, and there was still an uncanny feeling, a sense that something was not right in their relationship. The motions were there; they were intimate, they developed hobbies, they moved every few months, they hid their relationship when appropriate.

But usually, when Nicky was feeling badly he would talk about it. It was one of the things Joe loved about him, the way he could sit down and patiently unspool himself with his words. Joe tended to just say what he felt. He could dress it up with a metaphor or two; he had read over a millenia's worth of poetry. But when he felt something in his bones, he could only say it as it was.

Nicky spoke in complicated networks of clauses, amending and revising his ideas in motion. It was wondrous to hear his mind working. His words made the world more luminous, more clear and more simple. Long before they even fully understood one another, Nicky would talk to him, talking through his fading trust in his religion, his conflicts regarding the wars they fought in, his desire, deeply immoral but strong, to have Joe hold him down and fuck him until he couldn't remember where his skin ended and Joe's began.

Joe kept waiting, but it never came. The tension between them grew. Joe was patient; he had loved a complicated man for so long, after all. What wore on his nerves wasn't frustration, but helplessness: he couldn't help but feel that if he could only phrase the question correctly, he could help Nicky somehow, that they could work through the problem together. But no matter how he tried, his words remained disappointingly earthbound.

"Nicolo, light of my life, I was born only when you first looked upon me." _He knew that of course. He knew that and it changed nothing._

"Nicolo, I cannot be happy when you are sad, because you are half of my heart." _But he wasn't "sad", the way a child is sad when he loses a toy._

"Nicolo, this body of mine was made to be yours. Let me bear some of your burden. Tell me where to go, what to do, and I will do it with all my strength." _However old he may be, he was only one man, and some problems cannot be fixed by a single man._

He thought about the months after the Siege of Baghdad, over six hundred years ago, when Nicky had spent night after night whispering in his ear, warding away the memories of the fires climbing up the sides of the ancient libraries, the Mongol soldiers riding horses into crowds, crushing women and children underfoot, wearing leather book covers as sandals, looting of a five-hundred year-old city that had been so rich with history and life.

Every night, Nicky set Joe's head on his lap and he spoke, with such clarity and kindness, that it soothed him like a mountain spring running over his skin. Nicky spoke precisely to his concerns, preemptively struck down the dark thoughts that bubbled up in Joe's mind.

_You are Yusuf Al-Kaysani, who is a warrior, but also a lover and a maker and a writer and a life-giver. You could not save them all, but you did all you could. It was not enough, but that is no longer in your hands. All things will go, but you did not go because I need you, and others will come to as well. Although it seems as though all is lost, something new will come tomorrow._

He would fall asleep, not cured, but comforted.

In the mornings, he would open his eyes to find Nicky asleep, curled over him. They would mount their horses and he would see Nicky rub his neck, sore from sleeping upright, and he would wince with guilt. But Nicky just smiled at him with those bright blue eyes, that saw him so clearly, that saw him as he didn't deserve to be seen.

Perhaps what Nicky needed was something similar, but Joe couldn't seem to provide it. With each passing day, his lover became more opaque to him, even as their lives remained so intimately intertwined.

They didn't fight outright, but the air was tense nonetheless. Yesterday, they hadn't spoken to each other the entire day; after dinner, they sat in complete silence, Nicky reading some paperback he stole from a hitchhiker on the bus down, Joe cleaning and doing maintenance on their guns. He had finished swabbing the barrel and set the gun on the side table. Nicky looked at him over the edge of his book. Then they had had aggressive sex. When he woke up this morning, Nicky was gone.

Their neighbor had reached over the window and was banging on the side of their wall frantically. He jumped, and cut himself with his razor. Wincing, he grabbed a towel and dabbed at it with water, then watched it close up and heal in the mirror before coming out into the kitchen. Their neighbor was crawling into their house, hoisting herself over the windowsill and he came to help her, grabbing her arm as she hopped down onto the kitchen tile.

She was clearly familiar with the place because she immediately began opening cabinets and pulling out big pots. She found a set of buckets, one stacked on top of another, in the closet near the front door, talking quickly to herself all the while.

Joe followed her, confused at the frantic tone in her voice, the clear sense of urgency. At one point, she stopped and grabbed Nicky's jacket off the back of his seat and pointed in the general direction of the beach.

You'd think that having an immortal life partner would be a little easier on the nerves, but it wasn't for Joe. The more she spoke, the more bewildered and worried Joe became and his bewilderment and worry fed into each other, creating a vicious cycle that grew in intensity. By the time they were heading out the door, each carrying an assortment of large containers, struggling to kick the door handle with their feet, Joe was in a panic.

As they hurried down the dirt road, Joe kept catching himself leaving his neighbor behind, his long legs eating up the ground. He turned to wait for her and he must have looked a little crazy because she laughed, said something in a comforting tone of voice and brushed her knuckles against his arm.

The beach was alive with action by the time they reached it. A whole row of boats were resting along the shore and many villagers had come down to help keep the whale wet. Groups of fishermen were hustling back and forth. A sizable pile of fish had been left on a tarp and the containers were being used to run ocean water to the whale. Their neighbor joined a group of older women who were distributing pots and buckets, sorting by size and deploying groups of teenage boys to bring bigger buckets to the people carrying water to the whale.

Even the children with their little plastic buckets were running back and forth between the tide and whale, splashing the whale's sides with a small amount of water and getting most of it on themselves. A group of older men stood to one side, discussing a plan to get the whale back into the water; every once in a while, one of them would break away to come push against the whale, just to remind themselves of the animal's immense mass.

In the midst of it all, Joe didn't even initially register the whale. The first thing he saw was that familiar blonde hair, dark with water and spiked haphazardly. Nicky looked as though he had just been drowned. His white cotton undershirt was wet and clung to his body. He had his orange shirt, which was covered in sand, wrapped around his waist but it didn't conceal the fact that he didn't have any pants on.

Joe's animal side, still untamed after nine hundred years, took note of the darkness of Nicky's nipples through his shirt, the way his neck curved tightly into his collarbone, the flashes of pale white thigh, strong and shocking against his orange shirt-skirt. 

He and another man were lugging an enormous bucket of water up the shore toward the whale. When they reached the whale, Nicky and the man wound up, swinging the bucket back and forth until they built up enough momentum. The water flashed brilliantly as it splashed up the side of the whale. They were aiming to splash the top of the whale's back, which was high and exposed to the sun's heat. Water ran all down the whale's sides and it glistened in the sunlight. Young women were taking big washcloths and spreading the water along the parts of the body they could reach, trying to keep the whale's skin damp.

From where Joe stood at the mouth of road, he watched Nicky's strong back flexing beneath his shirt as he ran back toward the sea. He felt somehow that he could remember the touch of every muscle against his lips and yet he had never seen that back before.

His body almost seemed to short circuit. He felt air pressing against the back of his throat in a way that felt like a laugh, but there was a wetness on his face that did not match it. He tasted salt in his mouth and his nose was clogging with mucus and his chest was shaking uncontrollably. He felt his legs give way beneath him. His mind registered the pain in his rear as he hit the ground. He breathed in a great breath, one that could have been a sob or a gasping laugh. 

Nicky found him like that, fifteen minutes later. He thought about how ridiculous he must look, in his sleeveless undershirt still covered with a dusting of beard hair, half his facial hair trimmed, the other half damp with mucus and tears, his eyes rimmed with red, his breathing still unsteady. He tried to breathe and a laugh escaped, one that turned at its end toward sadness.

He lifted his hands helplessly. He tried to express all the humor and love he felt with the shrug of his shoulders.

But Nicky looked ridiculous too and he did not seem to mind. He kneeled down, keeping low so the grass concealed them from the people on the beach. He reached for Joe's hand and slowly, lovingly, kissed his palm and turned his face to rest against it. He felt the low laugh vibrate against the pads of his fingers.

"You cried?" Nile touched her hand to her heart. "Awww."

Now it was Joe's turn to scowl. Nicky smirked behind his hand. Joe was a sop, and he had never been ashamed of it, but Nile had a way of making light of his pronouncements and Joe wanted to be taken seriously by this strange, bold, funny, young (young, young, young) woman.

It’s part of the fun of having Nile around, really. It had been so long since they had really gotten to know another person. It was fun to watch Joe with Nile, to find out who his partner was with someone new, to see sides of him: the put-upon older brother, the enthusiastic swordplay instructor, the peacocking opera expert, the goofy shoulder-to-cry-on. All familiar, all recognizably the man he loved and yet different and new, refracted against Nile's personality.

"I'm just kidding," Nile says. "Why did you cry though?"

"I don't know. I wasn't sure then and I'm still not, now, you know," Joe says, reflectively. "It was a feeling of love, for certain. And surprise. It was a strange thing to see him, trying to save a whale of all things."

Nicky reached out and took his partner's hand. He stroked the inside of Joe's third finger with his thumb. Joe looked into his eyes.

"I have loved him for a long time. In this world, who has loved another, and been loved by another, for longer? For a thousand years, he has been the first thing I've seen every day, when my eyes are still thick with sleep. How many ways have I woken to him? Bleary, half-awake and vulnerable. Screaming, crying, unable to distinguish between dream and life. Aroused, easy and desperate for my touch. But these days, I notice when he is sleeping on his back instead of his side, when he has wedged an arm beneath my neck, the new way his hair is flattened against his head. I have seen him so many times. Still, he becomes more new to me."

"Isn't it strange, how easily we know people we don't truly care about? We comprehend them. They're cruel because their fathers didn't love them. They like this food, they don't like that one. They're not right for each other, or they are. We look only enough to fit them into our vision of the world, and then we stop looking because we think that we've understood them. When they act against our expectations, we say 'I've never seen this side of them!' and it's true because we haven't been looking. It was a love that was conditional from the beginning."

"To love someone deeply is to refuse to look away. To see the man I love lay waste to an army and wince with guilt when he falls into a field of wildflowers. To see him chase a retreating seagull with a burning joy and wrenching out a molar with a cold, clinical rage. To see the thoughtful clench of his shoulders as he brings a hammer to hot steel and the way a soap bubble slides along his spine as he waits for me to wash his back.”

“That he is still inexplicable to me after all this time is the great blessing of my life because to love someone is see them as both familiar and unknowable, as singular and infinite. To love someone is to say 'I will always look to you and see you more deeply. I have loved a thousand of you, and I will love a thousand more to come.' I had forgotten that for a long time." 

And he smiled at Nicky.

Nicky got up and kissed him. He had to.

"The monologuing really gets less cute every time. That _is_ a warning," Nile said but she was smiling. 

"She's touched," Nicky said in Arabic, lowly into Joe's ear and he felt the scrape of beard against his neck, the smile pressed against his skin.

They tried all morning to help the whale move back out into the ocean, but it was too heavy. By the afternoon, the whale was dead.

They went home. They had sex, quickly. Then Nicky took a shower and Joe shaved off the other half of his beard and they had sex again, taking their time.

They didn't really talk about it; they didn't talk much at all, but there was a kind of peace. Things weren't always better, but they were a little easier.

The village deployed a rotating schedule of guardians to watch over dead whale, which they wrapped in tarp. After a few days, Nicky realized that they were waiting for the meat to dissolve off the whale's skeleton so that it could be moved. When they went on walks along the beach, the two of them in the same direction now, they would always wave politely to the old fisherman fanning himself as he laid against the dunes. They would pause to look at the enormous outline of the carcass, wrapped like a strange present in dark green plastic, half submerged in the tide.

Later, their neighbor in the city would explain that the communities along the coast celebrated the whales as guardians of fishermen at sea. That several local fishermen had been saved during stormy weather by that particular whale, who had pressed itself up against their boats to stabilize them. That they prayed at the whale temple before journeying out to sea. That, in time, the whale's bones would be disinterred and brought to the temple. But all this, they would learn later, after they were gone.

Two months later, they went down to the beach again. Little by little, the bones had been cleaned and moved into the coffin and two monks from a nearby temple had been called down. Their robes were caked with sand at the bottoms and they had stripped down to the waist, their shaved heads shiny with sweat in the midst of the fishermen's tufts of black hair.

A group of villagers were arranging the food; baskets full of brightly covered fruits adorned with red ribbons and golden script, brightly colored bowls filled with rice, big brown bottles of liquor sealed with beige paper, and three fat kettles of tea, lined up on a little hill of sand. A small orange rolled free and a group of children chased it down toward the sea; the first boy to grab it threw it further into the water with a mischievous grin. An older girl hit him across the head angrily, and yelled at him while she hiked up her pants and waded into the sea to go grab it.

The coffin was a polished brown. Reams of bright red paper lined every side of the bamboo box and against it, the skeleton of the whale looked slightly cream-colored, with streaks of brown and dark red. Its ribs jutted upwards into the evening sky proudly. The sea water had muted its smell, but it was still there, the undertone of decay that mixed with the smell of saltwater, incense and food.

From their vantage point, they could see that the bottom of the coffin was covered with the rest of the smaller whale bones. They'd seen too many human skeletons in their life; the whale's skeleton had parts that looked vaguely recognizable (vertebra, ribs, the stalky fingers of the fin), but they were contorted in ways that looked alien, long but also remarkably delicate. It seemed incomprehensible that the enormous, powerful animal they touched could have also contained such graceful, refined bones.

The box was set on a huge cart, put together for this purpose. A car had evidently been brought from the city and a pair of older men were lugging a set of huge metal chains towards it. An older woman wearing a large straw hat leaned out of the passenger window and started to shout at them. They dropped the chains and began to shout at some younger men a little ways down the beach. This game of telephone continued for some time, much to Joe's amusement. He snorted and Nicky couldn't help but smile at him. 

"We never spoke about it," Joe said, slightly cautious, in Nicky's birth language, ceding his home ground.

"Sometimes, it's possible to speak too much," Nicky replied.

"I do that," Joe said, tilting his head and Nicky felt a stab of guilt.

"I meant me," he amended. "You speak to make real, I speak to escape into abstraction, maybe."

Joe laid his face against Nicky's shoulder.

"We've fought in so many wars, too many," he said. "Was this time different? It's always hard."

"Their lives are getting longer," Nicky said. "The men we fought with, they were only boys now. People their age were men in the past, but now they have more life to lose. And we lose more of them every time around."

"But they were brave, nonetheless," Joe said.

"But they will go home, changed. After centuries, it still hurts me. It will be worse for them. And a new war starts every month these days. Those men will go home, hollowed out inside. Their sons will wonder what part of their fathers was left behind, somewhere in the Pacific. Sooner or later, the sons will go to war too, but they will have even less to fight for because they know how much their fathers lost. For what? When we were young, we had God, or Allah. Perhaps it was foolish, perhaps it was misplaced, but we had something, a purpose that kept us sane. To know, as the life drains out of you, that you died for nothing? Even after we left, I couldn't shake that dread."

Nicky shivered. The wind was picking up, but he wasn't cold. Joe wrapped an arm gently around his waist and he leaned into him.

"When we were trying to save the whale, something felt familiar. I didn't even know, in the moment, that they revere the whales, but I felt the urgency. There was a sense of communion, a higher power driving our actions. Even though I don't share their beliefs, I had a sense of our shared humanity, our smallness in the face of the greatness of the world. I hadn't just lost that, I had forgotten that I had it at all. When I tried to remember myself fighting your armies back then, I thought of myself fighting the way we do now: as a means to an end, as a personal ethical obligation, as fulfillment of a divine contract I never signed."

"I don't know if we're no longer human, or if we're more human than any before us," Joe said.

Nicky nodded in agreement. The procession had formed, two lines of older fishermen walking alongside the slowly moving whale coffin while the rest of the mourners walked a respectful distance behind them. The thick metal cords groaned as the car strained to pull the enormous carcass. It was almost dark now, and the villagers had lit incense and carried small lanterns as they walked slowly along the shore. The two monks walked in front of the car, praying, their heads dipped low.

A group of women near the front were singing and some of the men had brightly decorated drums that they were beating in time to the music. The little children were restless and they wanted to dance together, but their parents held them close. People were dancing, or just swaying as they walked, each individual body moving in its own time and the whole mass blurred into one body, throbbing and making music. Rich golden-red shapes rippled on the water's surfaces, the reflection of the procession gliding along the ocean's face. In the distance, they could see the brightly painted boats, bobbing in a long row toward the docks in the distance.

"War is going to come here. Nowhere is free of it anymore, Yusuf, and all this will be lost" he said, gesturing out toward the villagers by the sea. "What the world is losing, we're losing too. Andy is six thousand years old. It's possible we could have five thousand more ourselves and I will love you for all of those five thousand years, I know. But by the end of it, will anything else be left of me? Andy and Booker, they envy us because we have each other. I am of you, and I will always be. But to love you is to want to be more for you and these days, I just seem to be losing things; faith, hope, whatever. You have given me so much. I'm sad because I don't know how much more I have to give."

Everything was wrong. He sounded whiny, insecure and high-minded. As his vocal cords formed each word and it escaped through his mouth, he felt the immediate throb of wrongness, the instinctive pang of his body recognizing how flimsy the language felt as his love (and fear, one and the same) tested its weight against it.

It was too much to explain now, how much everything had become entangled. The way washing his face in the morning had become: dunking his head into the river to wash the blood tangled in his hair, caressing Joe's face as he coughed up sea water in blue-green heaves, plunging face-first into the Atlantic tide as bullets whizzed over his head, water falling over a woman's delicate foot outside a mosque in Nagoya, being woken with cold water as men screamed at him in broken Chinese, standing beneath a gentle waterfall hundreds of years ago in a rain forest on another continent.

That he knew the word for "wash" in twenty languages; that he had traced its evolution over centuries and he carried it all in a single word, that the word meant so many things that it no longer meant anything, that he could not tell if he was too much for the world or if the world was too much for him.

It was all tied up. His anxieties about the world, about the work they did, about Joe, about his past, about his future and about his sense of self were all intertwined in such a complex web that he could no longer unravel it. And to put it in to words was to fail to convey it, always.

"Do you want to take some time apart?" Joe asked and his voice was afraid in a way that was unfamiliar and painful.

"I would die without you," Nicky said, trying to let his voice bear the weight of this truth. "My heart might continue to beat and my body could heal itself, but I would only be staying alive. I can't live without you."

"Nor I without you," Joe said and he turned his body toward Nicky, extending his legs and wrapping himself around him. 

"We don't seem to be getting better at this," Nicky said into the skin behind his lover’s ear, damp with ocean and sweat

"We were always good enough," Joe said back. "And things have been better since the whale."

Nicky gave him a sidelong glance and Joe laughed.

"Saved by the whale," he said. "The dead whale."

"I just can't to shake this feeling," Nicky said. "I don't know why I tried to hurt you. We're too old. But I did even though I love you more than anything."

"Do you remember in Quito? When Andy bought all of those cakes and I thought I could eat as many as I wanted and my stomach would cure itself?"

"You threw up on a pregnant woman and she threw up on me," Nicky said. It still irritated him a little.

"After I threw up, I felt so sick. But I still wanted to eat another one," Joe said and Nicky looked at him and he had to laugh. Joe laughed with him and it felt so nice. He had forgotten how long it had been since they had really laughed together.

"It's human to feel things that don't agree. Sometimes, those feelings go away. It could take a long time but I would wait for you, because you have all of me. If you wanted me to leave, I would. And I would follow you from a respectful distance wherever you went and I would look pathetic and haggardly and mothers would cover their children's eyes when I was near but I would wait. Time is all we have."

It wasn't enough but it had to be. It wasn't a solution, but it was a resolution. That was what he had come to understand, while trying to help the whale. They would never solve anything ever again; they had lived too long, seen too much, to have those kinds of illusions. In the face of the coming millennia, a life that went on and on and on, resolve was all they could carry; the resolve to go on and to look to what would come with love. 

The procession had stopped and though a few people were still singing loudly, there was a low hum of conversation that was getting louder. The woman in the passenger seat of the car opened the door and stood up on her seat. She called to the monks and pointed and they turned to look toward the ocean. The crowd was looking that way too, and some of the fishermen were taking the small children up on their shoulders, hoisting them above the crowd. Joe, who saw them first, leapt up and reached out a hand to pull Nicky up with him.

They were dipping in and out of the water in a steady rhythm; when they came up to the surface, the light of the moon slid along their glistening backs. They expelled water, gently, respectfully, beautiful plumes that began narrowly but dissipated into shimmering mist at their peak. There were eight or nine of them, all of them smaller than the whale that was being buried but still much larger than a person. They did not make noises, but they were swimming in circles, bumping gently against one another every once in a while the way a family might reassure one another with touch.

Slowly but surely, they approached the shore, coming past the line of boats, past the low tide line, close enough that the villagers would later swear that the sound of their fins moving through the water was distinguishable from the waves. The way they moved through the water looked gentle, slow and regal, but to see them was to know the strength and power in their bodies, to be in the presence of something benevolent and ancient.

The funeral participants began to sing again, louder; they were singing with the whales now and their voices had a kind of wonder to them. Nicky and Joe stayed on the beach as the procession moved further down the shore and the whales followed.

Eventually, the funeral turned away from the shore and moved inland toward the graveyard where the whale would be buried. They watched the whales, who lingered along the shore until the light and noise of the funeral procession disappeared behind the foliage. Then, the whales turned and swam back out towards the sea. One by one, with a last, lingering flourish, they dove, moonbeams skittering down their upturned tails as they disappeared back out to the open sea.

The night was cooler now, and the waves were quiet. Nicky and Joe sat together for a long time and they did not need to speak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, no disrespect was meant, take all cultural representations with a grain of salt, please reach out if anything bothers you or is incorrect. 
> 
> It may also not be scientifically accurate; I have no idea how big a whale is.
> 
> Vietnamese fishermen do hold funerals for whales that wash up on shore. There are many stories of other whales coming near the shore during these funerals. You can read more here:  
> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1954/d5a534bda427b91dd5b0276f432fd4d3f5d5.pdf?_ga=2.263821772.1511611367.1594591635-850410111.1594591635
> 
> and here:  
> https://saigoneer.com/saigon-culture/13047-whale-worship-exploring-the-role-of-whales-in-vietnam-s-coastal-lore
> 
> I always really appreciate comments and feedback; I love hearing what you liked/what I could do better. I want to keep updating but I'm pretty busy so I'm not sure when I will post again. If you'd like to be updated when/if I add more, subscribe.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	2. take a trip into my garden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not Turkish or Muslim and have never been to Istanbul. I tried my best to portray it respectfully! Please don't take it seriously as it is probably pretty inaccurate but if there are any issues let me know and I will address ASAP.
> 
> Title is from "Bloom" by Troye Sivan. "Animal" from the same album would also be an appropriate sound-track.

"You said it that way to mess with me," Nile said accusingly.

"I don't know what you mean," Nicky said, a smile playing on his lips.

"Look, if you just randomly say something like that, I'm obviously going to assume I misheard. My French is pretty bad still," Nile said. "I was so thrown off that I let some guy get two shots on me."

"We didn't mean to startle you," Nicky said soothingly, "but that is the reason it was brought into Istanbul. I was just trying to communicate with Joe."

"Alright, well, as a note for the future? Screaming 'the circumcision elephant' is going to leave me wanting a little context." Nile said drily.

  
Yusuf liked Istanbul. He came from a merchant family, and he liked the enterprising spirit, the energetic mishmash of cultures, the irrepressible optimism. 

He liked the stray animals (cats, dogs, storks) that gathered at the mosques to be fed. He liked the groups of apprentices who squatted together beneath the trees, frantically trying to finish calligraphy assignments. He liked the matchmakers who sat outside the baths, shrewdly watching the young women who came in and out, muttering criticisms to each other. He liked the young sailors who lounged along the shore and traded stories that were mostly lies. He liked the wealthy wives who would parade through the Grand Bazaar, clothed in heavily embroidered silks, their maids and cooks trailing behind them, carrying thick loaves of fresh bread and fragrant herbs.

In a city like this, he felt, if not young, at least insignificant, inexperienced.

More importantly, people from all over Europe came to sell or buy or even just visit and admire the gardens and the baths, so Nicolò didn't stick out. Every once in a while, they would catch a brief spurt of Zeneize when they were wandering through the city and Nicolò would smile his homesick smile.

Nicolò liked the coffee. He liked the smell of the Bosphorus. He liked the way the Ottomans had built around the ruins of Constantinople, leaving a strange patchwork of architecture. Most of all, Nicolò, who always preferred cleanliness, liked the inns, which were well-kept and neat and a wonderful change from the smelly tent they spent most of their time in.

And so, here Yusuf found himself, swallowing the Istanbul morning in deep gulps.

He was flat on his back, his head propped up against a pillow. His hands, which had started behind his head, had been slowly migrating downward. He had them stacked on his chest now, but it wouldn't last long.

Nicolò was straddling his waist, riding him with his back turned. Yusuf didn't like being unable to see his face. He did like watching his ass, so he found it a fair compromise. 

Usually, Yusuf's mouth worked independently during sex. Whether he was murmuring in his lover's ear or screaming himself hoarse, he always felt a strong urge to speak. Most of what he said was nonsense in a mishmash of languages, but to expect him to stay silent would have been unreasonable.

Today, however, he was silent.

Today, Nicolò was doing the work. Every time he lifted himself, tension rippled up the muscles of his back. Just before Yusuf's cock slid out of him entirely, he dropped again and his entire body trembled. He wrapped his arms around his chest and Yusuf admired the way his shoulders, broad and strong, tapered to the slimness of his waist, which fit neatly in Yusuf's hands. Then his thighs clenched, his toes curled and he pushed himself up again.

Breathing in a shuddering breath, Nicolò turned his head and looked into Yusuf's eyes and then moaned in a deliberate wanton way.

This was a secret about Nicolò: his vanity.

Yusuf knew that he liked this, he liked to be looked at. The way Nicolò tilted his head to show his jawline and the curve of his neck, the way he arched his back to make his ass look more round and full and lush, the way he dug his fingers into his backside as he stretched himself, trying to take more of his lover.

The way he would catch Yusuf staring at him occasionally, in the thick of things, and a small pleased smile would creep onto his face. He would turn away quickly and think that Yusuf hadn't noticed, but Yusuf always did.

Nicolò liked to play this game, where Yusuf had to lay back and not touch him, not speak. If Yusuf gave in, if he reached out to pull Nicolò to him and whisper filthy things in his ear, he lost.

Yusuf grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, brought his left fist to his mouth and bit. He moaned into his fingers.

The truth was, these days it wasn't much of a competition. They both knew the end result. But there was still pleasure in the tug-of-war.

Nicolò's pace became faster and more frantic. He shifted his weight forward onto his left hand. Arching his back, he forced himself down harder. When he bottomed out on Yusuf's cock, he grinded downward, as though trying to pull Yusuf deeper. With his right hand, he jerked himself off in fast strokes and Yusuf could feel him pulsing around his dick in time to the stroking.

As Nicolò moaned, he threw his head back and pushed himself up again. This time, he pushed a little too hard and Yusuf's cock slid out and fell back against his stomach. Nicolò looked back again, frustrated this time. Yusuf couldn't help but grin at him.

The shift in Nicolò's eye from aroused to mischievous was almost imperceptible. Yusuf knew him too well not to notice.

Nicolò sat back on his lover's stomach and bent over. His body blocked Yusuf's view of his own cock. 

Yusuf felt Nicolò's fingers wrapping carefully around his cock. Nicolò's thumb swiped gently up and down the underside. He felt the first, timid breaths as Nicolò dipped his head down. Then, the warmth radiating from his lover's mouth as his lips hovered around the tip of Yusuf's cock. Expecting to be enveloped in heat, he bucked his hips upward in anticipation.

Instead, Nicolò blew on his cock, gently. It was a stuttering breath, one that was almost a laugh.

Yusuf let out something that was halfway between a growl and a whine. He sat up and wrapped both arms around his lover's torso. With all his strength, he rolled them both over and positioned himself on top.

"You win," he said into the Italian's ear. "Are you happy?"

"Deliriously so," Nicolò laughed.

"Too many syllables," Yusuf said. "You shouldn't be so coherent." 

He sank back into Nicolò with a firm stroke. He pressed up every part of his body against the other man, trying to cover as much skin as possible. As much as Nicolò liked to be on top and in control, Yusuf knew that he liked this just as much, to be smothered. To lay on his stomach and allow himself to be overwhelmed. Yusuf pushed himself in again and again, relishing the hot resistance of Nicolò's body.

"You like that?" he asked and Nicolò let out a yes that was breathy and pleased.

He asked again, and Nicolò said yes. He asked again, and Nicolò said yes.

Apart from registering the warmth and wetness and tightness, his brain was no longer capable of forming new thoughts. Over and over again, he asked the same question and every time Nicolò affirmed him with a voice that grew thicker with arousal.

He didn't ask because he was insecure. He asked because since he had met Nicolò, it was no longer enough just to feel good. It was not enough, even, to make Nicolò feel good. In a moment like this, sex was not an exchange. It was not that his body felt good and separately, Nicolò's body felt good too.

Instead, he felt as though the halo of pleasure was enveloping their intertwined bodies. They were feeling as one, as though the pleasure were seeping through the places where their skin touched. Every breath of Nicolò's was his as well; the barriers of their body disappeared. Nicolò's skin seemed to continue where from his skin ended.

It was as though their sensations were merging, the way that, when you touched two of your fingers together, the individual inputs from the nerves of each finger were merged by the mind into a single feeling. 

It was that oneness that pressed against his chest, made him gasp for air, pushed him toward a climax that threatened to engulf him. It was that oneness that he murmured into Nicolò's ear, that he sought at every turn.

 _Is my pleasure yours,_ he was really asking, _and your pleasure mine?_

"Touch me, please," Nicolò said as he pushed himself onto all fours, keening back submissively. Yusuf grabbed one of his ankles and pulled him roughly.

He wrapped his hands around Nicolò's cock and began to stroke him. At this point, his thrusts had become shallow and quick. To be outside of Nicolò for any amount of time seemed unendurable. He slammed himself against Nicolò's back again and again, building momentum and letting it snap through his body like a whip.

He bit into Nicolò's shoulder and sucked. Nicolò came with a half-strangled moan. His hand was wet. Nicolo's skin was salty with sweat. His entire body tightened around Yusuf's cock. Yusuf came.

He continued, at a slower pace, to push into Nicolò's body, loose and relaxed. Nicolò turned to face him. He put one hand on Yusuf's cheek and smiled dopily, while his other hand reached around to Yusuf's ass and pushed him deeper. No longer chasing an orgasm, Yusuf basked in the simple pleasure of being inside that living warmth.

Eventually, Yusuf collapsed. Rolling over, he let Nicolò plaster himself to his side. If Yusuf liked to talk during sex, Nicolò liked to talk after. He liked to whisper into Yusuf's ear in his mother tongue, mumbling about how happy he was, how good he felt, how much he loved him. He stroked Yusuf's face with his thumb, his eyes closed.

Though he repeated the same words over and over like a mantra, his voice was flushed with the unspoken.

They laid in bed like that for what felt like hours. Occasionally, Yusuf would get up to get a drink of water or seek out some piece of clothing, but then he would see Nicolò, lazily spread out, his skin flushed against the white sheets, and he would have to get back into bed.

In the early morning when they had started, a beam of sunlight had framed a pair of Yusuf's shoes that were lying near the window. Now, that sunbeam had moved the bed. In the light, Nicolò's eyes looked iridescent and Yusuf found himself feeling deliriously happy too.

The festival for the prince's circumcision was fifty days long and twenty-five days had passed. The district they were staying in, some ways from the Atmeydani where the performances were staged, was quieter. But the festive energy was still present. As they made their way down the stairs, they were almost overrun by a group of young boys, carrying bags of clothes.

Because all the children wanted to attend the events in the evening, chore productivity had skyrocketed in the past few weeks.

They stepped out on to the street. Near the inn, there was a large bathhouse that was built recently under orders from the Sultan. They went there often, especially on days when they had sex in the morning. 

The narrow cobblestone streets were winding and filled with shops. As they walked by, they admired the bulky wooden carts, crammed into the narrow alley between houses. As part of the circumcision festivities, the artisan guilds of the city had assembled the carts to be paraded before the sultan. 

They had gone to see the rehearsals in a nearby park last week. Each cart was a mini-workshop. In the cramped, shaky recreations of their workspaces, soapmakers cut thick bars of pale green soap, leather-workers cut long strips of rich brown skin, and hat-makers sewed silk hats right on to their clients' heads. The coffee sellers recreated a whole coffee shop, complete with a pair of lazy customers, who played a unsteady game of chess and smoked tobacco. Small armies of apprentices, sweating through their loose pants, pushed the carts in big circles. 

Nicolò had been intrigued and impressed, had clapped and whistled for each cart as they passed; he was always curious and appreciative of craftsmen. The artisans had fawned at the attention, waving to him and smiling. Thinking of it now, Yusuf smiled at the back of Nicolò's head, where a tuft of hair stood up, swaying back and forth in the breeze. He had their bath bowl tucked under one arm. Their soap and wash cloths clattered against the steel of the bowl.

As they neared the bath, they heard the sound of music, chatter and, floating above it all, the wail of a baby. Outside the bathhouse's more discreet female entrance, a large group of people had gathered.

The party was evidently largely composed of wealthy people; Yusuf noted admiringly the rich satin fabrics in lavender, chartreuse and maroon, the delicate, tasteful jewelry that seemed to drip from the women's arms and necks. 

Most of these people, neighbors and friends, were simply idling, trading stories and praising the health and appearance of the baby and mother. Occasionally, they would cast affectionate glances at the newborn. 

Two teenage girls and a slightly younger boy had squatted down around a basket of fragrant leaves for the baby's bath. Two hired dancers in light pink robes were showing one of the younger girls some of their steps; their musician sat to their right, plucking out an improvised tune on his lute.

In the center of it all, a veiled woman pressed the crying baby, swaddled in a rich blue shawl, to her chest. Her mother stood beside her, cooing gently. Her husband and father were speaking in hushed tones, their bright yellow turbans shaking slightly as they argued.

Nicolò went ahead to the attendant to pay. Yusuf couldn't help but look back once again at the baby admiringly. Though clearly miserable, she looked healthy, with bright red cheeks and a strong voice. Already, her features were forming: a delicate nose that would sharpen with time, bright thoughtful eyes. 

No matter how old he got, he still marveled when he saw babies, soft and malleable and experiencing everything for the first time. This living thing's lifespan was a drop in the ocean compared to his, but he couldn't help but think of his own nephews, whom he had carried gently in his arms, who had buried their faces in the crook of his elbow, who were long dead.

The baby's fat cheek was pressed tightly to her mother's neck and she slapped her little hand on her mother's chin, as though trying to pull her closer, to touch more of this familiar body who had brought her into the world.

The baby and mother had been kept at home for 40 days, to protect them during the most vulnerable time after the pregnancy. Today, they would be purified in the baths with prayer and celebration from their family and friends, to mark their good health and the child's entry into the world. 

Nicolò touched his shoulder and gestured with his head. The younger man had a strange expression on his face. They walked to the men's entrance, which was around the corner.

A wall of humidity hit them as they walked through the door. The first room, the dressing room, was almost perfectly square. The marble ceiling was enormous and domed. Wooden cabinets lined all four sides of the room. Two long stone benches ran the length of the room. 

The room was damp; the heat from deeper in the baths crept into the room in waves of steam as men walked in and out. The men who had finished bathing sipped coffee and chatted on the benches, their skin red and damp. A nervous young man in the corner was selling cheese, beverages and strips of meat. Along the interior wall, men crouched next to displays of soaps and brushes, calling out prices.

Attendants came to give them towels; Nicolò's had a ring to designate his non-Muslim status. They began to disrobe. As Yusuf undid his turban, he watched with pleasure as Nicolò pulled off his caftan, undid his trousers and wrapped himself in the towel.

Nicolò's back was broad and pale in the steam. Yusuf had to tear his eyes away from deep grooves of his back muscles flexing. He sat down on the bench for a moment and tried to calm his growing arousal. Then he got up and followed Nicolò deeper into the bath.

The bath's main room was an enormous dodecagon. The great blue domed ceiling had a hole in the center, and single shaft of natural sunlight beamed into the center of the room. An enormous pentagonal marble slab took up most of the center of the room. 

Water spouts were embedded into the walls at fixed intervals and the water flowed out into ten big marble basins. The steam was extremely thick, almost oppressive. As they walked through the room, a disembodied hand or leg would appear first, brown and shiny with sweat; then the full body would come into view as they moved closer.

They chose the basin furthest from the entrance, which was partially hidden behind one of the enormous columns. Setting down their bath bowl, Yusuf pulled out some soap and a small washcloth. He sat down in the recess in the wall to the left of the sink, and Nicolò sat down on the other side. 

With big exaggerated motions, Yusuf pretended to dip his hands in the water and then rub his head, as though showing Nicolò how to wash himself. Nicolò shot him an irritated look. In public, they often pretended to be a foreign traveler and a guide as a way of preemptively answering strange looks. Today, though, it was hardly necessary because they had come to the bath at an extremely busy time. 

Some men were frantically scrubbing themselves clean; it was almost time for the Friday prayer at the mosque across the street and they were performing their ablutions quickly to not be late. A group of Jewish men, with heavyset shoulders sat side by side against the wall, soaking in the steam. The bath's primary customers were laborers and artisans from the large market nearby. Most of them worked up a sweat lugging their carts and wares around in the early morning and were relaxing here before they had to go back and do it again in the afternoon.

The only sound was the cracking of bones, the rough grate of sponges on skin and the flow of running water. In one corner, a barber was quickly and efficiently dispatching a customer's beard. The bath attendants were pale and slender, with dark hair; many were migrant workers who came to the city to earn money to send home. Mostly in their teens, they were soaping and scrubbing clients who laid on the warm marble slab using sponge-covered gloves. Younger boys kneeled by the customer's backs, massaging with the full weight of their bodies.

Nicolò had taken their soap and worked a lather up in his hands. He was sitting in front of the basin. Yusuf stood up and came to crouch next to him. He rested his back against the wall, so they were concealed from most of the rest of the room by the enormous column.

"Come here," Yusuf said quietly.

Nicolò looked up nervously at first. He scanned the rest of the room, but nobody else in the bath was even looking their way; the thickness of the steam and their location had largely concealed them. 

Assured, Nicolò relaxed and turned around. Sitting down on the floor between Yusuf's legs, he bowed his head. Yusuf admired him like this, the relaxed slope of his shoulders, the faint imprint of his spine against his neck.

He got a good amount of soap onto his hands and then buried them in Nicolò's hair, which was thick and shaggy. Pulling his hands through it gently, he rubbed soothingly along Nicky's scalp, pressing gently against the sides of his face. He washed the younger man's face, pausing and pretending to scrub at Nicolò's mole until the other man slapped his hand. He snickered.

He used the washcloth to scrub Nicolò's neck, watching the dead skin come away in heavy brown specks. He washed Nicolò's back and then pulled the younger man toward him; Nicolò's head came to rest at his groin and he washed Nicolò's front side as well. He gently massaged Nicolò's chest, feeling the tension seep out of his muscles.

He enjoyed the smoothness of familiar flesh. Washing his lover was a comfort for him, to run his hands over the clean unbroken skin of Nicolò's neck, where his throat had been slit two weeks ago, or strong firm musculature of his right arm, which had been bent at an unnatural angle last month. 

Occasionally he checked to make sure the other bathers were still preoccupied, weren't looking and whispering in their direction. Two fully grown men washing each other with this degree of intimacy probably wouldn't be well received, particularly in the baths, where modesty was prized and enforced. But luck was on their side and nobody bothered them.

He filled the bowl with water from the basin and poured it over Nicolò. He watched the suds slide down the other man's body, the way they clung to the landscape of his body. Nicolò's long hair hung over his face and he shook himself like a big dog.

They got up. Nicolò moved to switch positions, but Yusuf grabbed his wrist and turned him toward the slab instead.

"Go lay down, I'll come find you," he said.

"You shouldn't spoil me like this," Nicolò said, but he was smiling sleepily. "I'll become insufferable."

The other man left to go lay down on the marble table. Yusuf dipped his washcloth in the basin and began to clean himself with efficient quick motions. He lathered the soap on his chest, scrubbing his shoulders and sides.

Sitting down on the ledge, he washed each leg methodically. When he got to his ass, he washed each cheek and then paused. Looking around to make sure nobody was looking at him, he slipped one finger in between.

Touching his own hole with intention was a strange feeling. He felt the firm musculature that surrounded it, taking in the novelty of the sense of pressure, processing the simultaneous inputs from his fingers and his ass. Pushing a little harder, he broke through the ring of muscle. His finger, slick with soap, slid forward easily, and before he knew it, he had reached the knuckle.

The feeling was unpleasant, not because it was physically painful, but because it was foreign and not at all like he imagined. His entire body was stiff and aware of the intrusion, but it was more irritating than anything, somehow similar to the nagging feeling of having something stuck in your teeth. He tried to move his finger in and out, but the odd sensations only intensified. He was surprised by how sensitive he was; he swore he could feel the sharp ridge of his fingernail, the wrinkled skin of his knuckle.

He had tried this several times now and it always felt strange. But here he was, trying it again.

He heard footsteps and quickly pulled his finger out. Wiping it off on a washcloth, he got up and walked toward the hot slab of marble.

Nicolò was laying flat on his back on the slab. Swirls of steam clung to his body; every so often, he would shift or breathe a deep breath and they would dissipate in a puff. Yusuf came and sat by his head. Discreetly, he reached out to stroke one of Nicolò's ears.

"It was good this morning, no?" he murmured.

Nicolò made an affirmative noise from deep in his chest. He looked relaxed, but he was frowning a little now. Yusuf paused for a second, and then forged on.

"Do you ever...think about doing something new?" Yusuf asked. "Something different?"

There was a silence. When he looked down, he was surprised to find Nicolò with an much more unpleasant look on his face.

"I don't want to talk about this," Nicolò said finally. "Not here."

"How do you know what I was going to say?"

"It's obvious."

Yusuf was taken aback. He hadn't thought he had been all that obvious about it. He wasn't even sure what that meant.

Nicolò sat up abruptly.

"I only wanted to ask," Yusuf said. "If you don't want to--"

"I'm hot," Nicolò interrupted. "I think I'm going to leave."

His face was grim and his shoulders were tight with defensiveness. Yusuf was confused as to how they had gotten here. 

"Are you going back to the room?" he asked.

"No," Nicolò said. "Don't wait for me."

He stood up and wrapped the towel tighter around his waist. His feet slapped wetly against the floor as he strode away. Yusuf watched his pale body disappear into the steam, too surprised to even say anything.

  
Yes, it was four hundred years into their relationship. But to say that it took Yusuf four hundred years is an exaggeration. 

First of all, they were busy. It took months just to travel from one place to the next. They went weeks without showering, sleeping on thin blankets, huddled under a single tent when it rained. They smelled until they got used to it. Their hair grew grimy and coarse. They developed sores between their thighs, where the horse saddle chafed against their skin.

Half the time, they were too tired anyways. Riding horses at a breakneck pace all day left them sore and irritable. And there was Andromache and Quynh to think of as well. They came to know each other well enough that sometimes the women would just conveniently disappear and they would have the tent to themselves. Likewise, he and Nicolò would occasionally wander off to admire a particularly beautiful landscape or take the horses out to graze, to allow the women to do as they pleased for a while.

The immortality may have had something to do with it; perhaps it slowed their bodily needs, the way time stretched out in front of them. And they were constantly rushing into battle: the sharp adrenaline spikes, the intense physical pains, watching your body heal itself over and over again, all changed the relationship to the body.

All in all, there were stretches of times, decades even, where they had very little sex at all, for various reasons.

And even when they did find the time, so often logistics got in the way. It was easier, with hands, the two of them sitting facing each other, legs entangled. He liked the eye contact. If time wasn't of the essence, they'd use their mouths, or Nicolò would rub oil between his thighs and Yusuf would rut against him and murmur into his ear. 

Only when they were in between work, when they had the time and a room and a bed, when they could prepare and clean afterwards, did Yusuf find himself looming over his lover, mouth clamped on the taut tendon of his neck, sinking into his warmth. Sex (like food and sleep and clothing) was something that they needed, but that they'd have to take in whatever form they could get it in. 

So yes, it was four hundred years before Nicolò fucked him. But it wasn't because he had been afraid or anything.

For a long time, it just wasn't a thought. The first time, they had just followed the flow of the moment. At some point early on, there must have been a conversation where they discussed who did what, but he couldn't remember it anymore. They had been having sex for so long now; the individual instances blurred together.

The truth was, Yusuf had always been the holdout when it came to their sex life. He had set the pace, and it was Nicolò, sweet and patient, who he always seemed to be catching up to. When he had attempted to discuss this with Andromache, it had surprised and then amused her.

"What is there to be surprised about?" he had asked.

"I don't know. I guess I just didn't expect it. He was a priest, after all. He was celibate for so long. He seems sort of... chaste, no?"

"She thought you would be the initator, the one who leads in carnal matters," Quynh said with a playful glint in her eye, as her horse pulled even with them. "The pursuer."

Yusuf squinted at her. 

"She can read lips," Andromache said while Quynh snickered.

He thought about all the times he had whispered affections into Nicolò's ears when he was bored. He made a mental note to cover his mouth next time.

In any case, it had always been Nicolò who had lead, from the beginning.

In the first few years after they met, they tried to pretend that they weren't following each other, that they just happened to be going the same way. They tried to maintain some sense of pride even though they both were secretly, desperately afraid and clung to one another to keep from being totally alone in the world. 

Steps that should have taken only months (acknowledging their friendship, forming a partnership, deciding on a mission for themselves) took years, because they didn't wish to speak it. But they found their way eventually. They had more than enough time, anyway.

Of course, even then he had thought of Nicolò in that way. He had watched water dribble out of the corner of the other man's mouth as he drank from a river. He had been left in a daze by the flex of Nicolò's ass when he tossed their bags onto a horse. He had dreamed about the nape of his neck. 

Even then he had liked silly things, things he had never thought about on any other person; the blue vein that skimmed Nicolò's ankle, the dip at the center of his chest between his pectorals where sweat would pool, the dimple just below the small of his back.

But Nicolò was all he had, and he hadn't wanted to jeopardize something that had still felt so fragile.

And then one night, as he sat by the fire alone, he felt a sudden urge to draw, a habit he hadn't indulged in for some time. He had a pad of paper and reed pen in his bag, so he got up and crawled under the flap of their shared tent.

The interior of the tent was lit by the light of the campfire, rich orange and casting shadows that flickered wildly. Opposite the door way, Nicolò was sitting on the ground. He had stacked up their bags and leaned a cushion up against it. He was laying on it, his shoulders back, his legs spread haphazardly on the ground in front of him. His pants were bunched up at his ankles and his shirt was on the floor beside him. He had his cock, hard and heavy, in his right hand.

When Yusuf stepped in, Nicolò stopped mid-stroke.

The way he was sitting, the way he had arranged himself, facing the tent flap, made it clear that he had considered this possibility. Hoped for it, probably. Maybe even thought of it, in the moments before, while Yusuf was outside and he was in here, touching himself. But now, he was sitting completely still. His head was high, proud, and he was looking directly into Yusuf's eyes.

There was no fear in his eyes, and there was no shame either. But there was vulnerability and kindness: Yusuf was being given the choice to turn around and to walk away, but this man, this strange man who had killed him so many times, was hoping that he would stay. 

It's a great shame of Yusuf's, looking back, that he didn't go him, wrap him up, show him the gratitude and love he deserved for this moment of exposure. But at the time, his mind was completely blank. He stood at the mouth of the tent, dumbstruck. But he did not leave.

After a few moments, Nicolò's hand started to pump again. Yusuf broke eye contact first. He looked down, watched the other man's hands as they pumped up and down. 

In battle, he had honed his attention to the minute details of the enemy's motions (the way a hand tightens just before a sword is drawn, the jerk of the shoulder when an arrow strikes) as a matter of life or death. 

Now, for the first time, Yusuf turned the full power of that attention to something else. He drank in the way Nicolò's fingers squeezed slightly as they reached the bottom of his shaft, the flash of a thumb across the tip, the sinuous turn of his wrist, the careful of modulation of speed that brought him closer and closer to the edge. 

He committed all these details to memory; he knew, somehow, that it was important, that he needed to burn them into his mind in a way that would not fade with the coming years.

The tent was warm and bathed in trembling orange light. In his memory, Nicolò's skin glowed like the filament of a lightbulb. His eyelids were half-closed and his long lashes fluttered. His strong nose cast a stark shadow on the left side of his face. His mouth hung open, his thick lower lip glistening slightly.

He tilted his face up and his eyes closed. As he let out a sigh, Joe watched his smooth neck tighten, a single bead of sweat sliding down the drawn tendon. He looked at the way shadows danced across Nicolò's torso, clung to each muscle of his firm stomach, and thickened along the underside of his shapely pectoral muscles. He looked at the way Nicolò's calves, white and dusted lightly with hair, lengthened as he spread his legs wider, opening himself up, so that Yusuf could see the curve of his ass, soft and pressed flat to the ground.

Only a warrior could understand the way Nicolò was slowly, deliberately exposing all of his most vulnerable areas, the parts of him Yusuf had spent months watching on the battlefield, the way he was now giving all of himself over to Yusuf. It was arousing and terrifying in equal measure.

Nicolò's stroking quickened. His other hand reached down and squeezed his testicles before slowly moving up his body, pausing to press gently into his abdominal muscles before sliding further upward to his chest. He circled his left nipple, hard and dark, and then squeezed it firmly with two fingers.

It seemed as though every ridge of muscle on his body tensed at once, the firelight caressing him as he spasmed and from low in his throat came Yusuf's name. One thick white bead, then two, leaked out of the tip of his cock. He jerked his hand down and then up once more, quickly, and one thick rope of semen after another splattered on his chest.

For a moment, everything was still. A pair of blue eyes met a pair of dark brown ones and there was nothing else in the world.

Then Yusuf turned and slowly walked outside. He had left a skin of water next to the fire and he picked it up now and went back into the tent. He was hard in his pants. His erection throbbed painfully as he bent down to lift the flap.

Nicolò was lying back, his entire body damp and languid. Yusuf pulled a cloth out of one of the bags near the entrance. He knelt down at Nicolò's waist. The water was slightly warm as he poured it onto the cloth and folded it neatly.

He started at Nicolò's chest, feeling the rounded warmth of his muscle through the fabric. The younger man's nipples firmed up again at the wetness and caught against Yusuf's hands. He noted the faint parallel scars that must have formed before they received immortality. Nicolò's breath had deepened; he could feel the tensing of muscle under skin, the pounding of the heart against the rib cage.

He slowly moved down the torso, pressing into the ridges of the stomach where the semen had pooled. He could feel the slight tremble of Nicolò's body, the way each muscle tensed and then relaxed as he caressed it. Yusuf skipped down to his legs, wrapping the towel around one full calf and then another. He massaged them gently and noted the way the water glistened against milky skin.

Nicolò's hand came up then and grasped his, and guided it to his cock, still half-hard. He looked at the way that his hands, rough and calloused and ugly, spanned the length of the smooth shaft, tinged gold in the light. He felt the shock of its firmness against the grain of the washcloth. 

Shifting his towel to his left hand, he took a hold of Nicolò's cock with his right hand. Tentatively, he washed it with the towel firmly, from top to bottom, cleaning off the slick semen that coated the underside.

This was how he first touched Nicolò, not in the heat of the moment like something to be conquered, but in the softness of the after, in the midst of something golden and holy.

It must have been funny, the attentiveness with which he washed Nicolò's genitals. He carefully cleaned the scrotum, cupping it and watching the water run along the soft wrinkles. He rubbed gently at a spot on his foreskin at least five times before he realized it was a mole. He brushed the pubic hair upwards toward the chest, admiring the way it clung wetly to the planes of the the stomach, thick and curling slightly like calligraphy script. 

But it was, all of it, just an excuse to keep his eyes fixed downward. 

He felt Nicolò lean forward, and then two hands grasped his face. A pair of lips, damp and soft, pressed against his forehead and then he looked up and he understood that he was looking into the eyes of someone who was no longer merely a traveling companion, a rival or even a brother-in-arms. 

That Nicolò had asked a question and now wanted an answer.

So Yusuf leaned forward and kissed him. 

He remembers every physical detail, every sensation of that kiss to this day. But his memory was not large enough to contain how he felt in that moment, which was immense and unfamiliar and yet unquestionably right.

That night, he walked, in a random direction into the desert night, for what felt like hours. He walked until he couldn't think, until he was no longer aroused, until his mind was completely empty. Then he turned around and walked back to their tent. 

Nicolò had taken Yusuf's blanket, which he had spread out so that it could cover two bodies. 

And for the first time, Yusuf undressed and slid in behind the other man, wrapped his arms gently around his torso, breathed in the scent of Nicolò's skin and sank into sleep.

Two days later, in the morning, Nicolò grasped Yusuf's cock and jerked him off while exploring the older man's mouth with his tongue. When Yusuf reached down, he found that the other man was already spent.

A week after that, Nicolò sucked him off for the first time. This time, Yusuf did return the favor.

Three months later, in a hostel outside Baghdad, they consummated their relationship and fell asleep whispering words of love and commitment in their mother tongues.

So yes, perhaps, in a sense, it was Nicolò who had stepped forward first. But Yusuf was not afraid, had never been afraid, had never wondered whether he wanted or if he should. His hesitance wasn't moral or religious, but visceral. 

Sometimes, in those early days, in the middle of sex, he would suddenly feel certain that his entire body was on the verge of bursting into flame, so harshly that his healing powers wouldn't even work quick enough. What he was feeling seemed like too much for his body, just flesh and bone, to contain. 

Every time he saw Nicolò, naked and stretched out in his bed, he felt deep in his body a sense of veneration.

Before they became too fluent in each other's languages, he left secrets, confessions, in his mother tongue, all over Nicolò's body.

 _Just to touch you here awakens me more than anyone I fucked before I met you,_ he groaned into the small of his lover's back.

 _Even after we met, I continued to dream of you, and in my dreams, I had you in every way, I consumed you,_ he whispered into the hollow of Nicolò's collar bone.

 _When you shift away in the night and I wake up alone, I feel a fear greater than any fear I have ever felt in battle,_ he murmured against the soft pulse of Nicolò's wrist.

Over the next four centuries, he learned Nicolò's body in many ways. Not just sex, but touch became a necessity. He reached for Nicolò always, in the middle of battle, first thing in the morning, before he sank into sleep at night. Always he wanted to touch, as though drinking from Nicolò's skin some kind of light. Perhaps this next step was inevitable.

He couldn't remember anymore when he had began to think about it. But it had been an intermittent thought for years now. He would catch himself daydreaming about it, or he would think about in the moments after sex, when Nicolò was heavy on top of him. He touched himself while thinking about it many times, and even dreamt about it.

But he hadn't spoken of it. He had been waiting for the right time and this break in Istanbul had seemed appropriate. And now, it seemed that maybe he shouldn't have.

  
Nicolò paused outside the gate of the garden. Leaning against the tan stone, he put his hands on his knees and took a deep breath. A few people gave him strange looks as they passed by.

He had spent the entire afternoon fuming through the dizzying maze of workshops, stores, bakeries, coffee shops and stands that made up the district market, one of the largest in Istanbul. He ignored or scowled at a good number of shopkeepers and salespeople. He scared a group of small children. He almost stepped on a stray cat.

He was in a foul mood and he was angrier at himself than anybody else.

What frustrated him was that he had even expected it. 

They had been living for so long that this kind of thing was surely inevitable. Andromache and Quynh had negotiated their way into a similar situation long ago, and they were fine; they loved and trusted one another unquestionably, and were happy when they were together.

 _But,_ the voice in his head said, _Andromache and Quynh's situation is even._

This was true. For every enterprising sailor or bored baker's wife Andromache disappeared off with, Quynh almost certainly was lavishing a similar amount of time and attention on some stable boy or traveling mercenary.

 _And,_ the voice in his head added petulantly, _they've been lovers for much, much longer. Surely I should get a little more time to have him to myself._

Because the truth was, even if Yusuf began sleeping with other people, it was hard for Nicolò to imagine having any kind of interest in anyone other than Yusuf anymore.

He can't remember when he started wanting Yusuf. Wanting Yusuf seems so natural now, so deeply entrenched in his identity, that he somehow feels like he had wanted Yusuf all his life, even though he knows that is impossible.

It's not so much the way he looks, although he likes Yusuf's smile which is slightly crooked and has a feral innocence. Yusuf's eyes, which taper gently when he smiles. Yusuf's body, proud and strong and hard.

But the Yusuf he lusts for a Yusuf in motion. Yusuf, copying a line of calligraphy with an thoughtful, practiced hand. Yusuf, early in the morning, stretching himself like a pleased cat. Yusuf, the very first time, charging at him, sword held aloft, every motion full of will and power.

Surely, he had wanted him from the beginning. And at some point, that low hum of desire that lived in his groin turned into something stronger, more tangible. 

Because this is a secret about Yusuf: he has "no game", as Nile might say.

Yusuf's poker face is all or nothing. He was born into a merchant family and he can negotiate with the best of them. When he wills it, his face is like a iron mask, betraying nothing. Under interrogation, Nicolò has seen him endure unimaginable cruelties without breaking.

But if he's showing one emotion, he's showing them all. When they're not working, when Yusuf's relaxed and unafraid, he expresses every emotion he feels on his face with a blazing clarity. Even his tells have tells.

Sometimes, Andromache or Quynh would look over at them and then turn away immediately with a slightly embarrassed expression, as though they had seen something deeply private. But Nicolò knew they just caught a look at Yusuf's face when the other man was looking at him. 

It was an expression so unabashedly affectionate that it had gotten them into trouble more than once.

So in those early days, when he began to notice Yusuf looking at him, he understood immediately. However subtle Yusuf may have thought he was, his lust was precise and scorching like hot steel.

Despite his priestly vows, Nicolò was not inexperienced in sex. Since he was young, he had always been pretty, with his pure blue eyes and pensive, refined face.

When he had been studying to become a priest, he had experimented with some of the other students in the night, first out of curiosity and later out of practicality. During the crusades, his companions had dragged him along when they snuck away to have sex with prostitutes; when they were caught by a superior, they would go back to their tent and touch one another instead.

But to be looked at, with such undisguised desire, felt radically new. He was more aware of himself than he had ever been. 

When he was washing his shirt in the river and caught Yusuf staring at his bare back, he pictured it in his mind. He imagined Yusuf looking at him and he imagined himself, bent over and half naked. He imagined himself arching his back, flexing the muscles of his shoulders, and then he did it. 

Had Yusuf seen it? He imagined the way the other man's eyes might flare, his jaw tighten with arousal. He wanted to turn around, to look, but he didn't dare. He felt charged with something, like some energy was running across his skin. 

Up until that point in his life, sex had been at best a practicality, at worst a sin. But Yusuf didn't act to satisfy his urges so that he could continue on with his life as planned. He spent months watching Nicolò, wanting and thinking. Never in his life had Nicolò been looked at so closely, for so long and with so much intent.

But tension can't rise without eventually breaking.

From the very beginning, sex with Yusuf was unpredictable and thrilling. Yusuf could be tender, rough, playful, or deliberate. In Yusuf's arms and in his eyes, Nicolò found himself as something to be coveted, to be worshiped, to be dominated, to be cared for, to be obeyed.

He learned to look at himself anew. Every night, he was reborn when he wrapped himeslf around Yusuf, breathing in his breath and taking his lover inside him. It was release and imprisonment; every time he felt liberated and yet the moment it ended, he found himself wanting more.

But he had thought that a proposition like this might be coming. Intellectually, he knew that maybe it was natural, after so long, to want some variety. He knew that what he and Yusuf had spent 400 years building wasn't going to break so easily. 

And he knew, of course, that sex was not love, that it could be just a way to pass the time, to revel in physical pleasure, to appreciate the diversity of the body, to explore oneself.

After all, the sultan of this very city had something like twenty concubines. But he was also famously, desperately in love with his wife, whom he married in defiance of royal protocols and her status as a former slave. 

But it wasn't what he wanted. To think of Yusuf, sleeping with anybody else, made him dig his fingernails into his palms with frustration.

He had seen Yusuf admiring the women outside the bath. In a way, he had anticipated the conversation, and yet he still felt ambushed when Yusuf had brought it up. He had felt hot and embarrassed and naked and stupid and immature and jealous. In the moment, he had frozen and he hadn't been able to say anything, and then he had stormed out like a child.

He had spent all afternoon thinking himself in circles. Finally, when fruit sellers had started to put their fruits back into their cloth sacks and the boatmen were tying their boats to the docks, he had reluctantly walked back to their room, only to find that Yusuf had gone to a nearby garden, leaving him a note.

He turned and walked through the gate. This pleasure garden had recently opened to the public and it was a popular space for people shopping and working at the markets to gather.

At its center, an enormous white pavilion, with a high pointed roof and ornately carved columns, offered a view of the Bosphorus, and beyond it, Anatolia, extending eastward. The edges of the park were lined with trees, thick leafy cypresses, tall pine trees and old, gnarled oaks. Fruit trees flanked the walkways and the ground was dotted with brightly colored flowers. 

These public gardens were cultivated along the natural landscape and they were also practical. Rich blooming perennials shared plots of land with cucumbers, herbs and lettuce. Golden orioles and squirrels flitted back and forth through white and yellow jonquils; young children chased after them, cackling when they dived out of reach. A young gardening assistant carefully trimmed the bushes under the watchful eye of his superior.

Families brought big tents. Mothers unpacked plates of cheese, figs and clotted creams. Groups of older men sat in circles, picking at the grass and sipping wine, their colorful turbans like big tulips. A musician sat on the railing of the pavilion, plucking at a lute while a group of young girls listened admiringly. Their grandmothers scowling at them from a distance.

Nicolò found Yusuf under a large pear tree, lying back on a taupe rug. He sat down by his partner's head. Even though Yusuf didn't shift, he could tell that the other man was awake.

Their positions were reversed from the bathhouse this morning. Looking down at Yusuf's unusually blank face, Nicolò tried to speak, but his throat felt thick and viscous.

"I missed you this afternoon," Yusuf said casually. His hands were folded behind his head, but Nicolò could see that they were curled into fists.

"Too much steam hurt my head," he said lightly. He looked up at the tree above them. A pair of nightingales, soft and brown, were watching them and cooing quietly. Their heads twitched and they shuffled their feet. 

"We're immortal but not impervious," Yusuf said. "Someday you'll learn, my young, young lover."

Nicolò plucked a few strands of grass and sprinkled them on Yusuf's face. A little dirt fell into the mix and Yusuf snorted and opened his eyes.

"Juvenile," he said, rubbing his face and beard.

"You are three years older, but I have four more deaths," Nicolò said. He knew it was the wrong thing to say, because Yusuf didn't like to joke about the times Nicolò had died in his arms. They didn't know how this gift came and went; was there a limit on the number of deaths? An age limit? The possibility that they wouldn’t die together hung over them.

But he made the joke anyways, because he knew it would make Yusuf look at him.

Yusuf sat up. His eyes were solemn, thoughtful, a warm brown specked with gold sunlight.

"I'm sorry," Nicolò said quickly. "I didn't mean it. I don't know why I said that."

After a moment, Yusuf lets out a slightly exasperated sigh.

"I was in the room all afternoon, feeling miserable. I come here to calm down and you follow me here to throw dirt on me and mock me." His voice sounded affronted but there was a smile playing on his lips. An offer of conditional forgiveness.

This back-and-forth was dense with subtext after four hundred years. It was so easy to slyly talk around the subject, to reach a detente. But Nicolò knew that the problem would only be resolved if he addressed it directly.

Lying to each other had gotten harder, but speaking honestly, truthfully, hadn't gotten any easier.

"You caught me by surprise," Nicolò said, "but I shouldn't have just run away."

Yusuf didn't say anything, so Nicolò pressed on.

"I hadn't realized you were so bored," he said, sullen.

"Not bored," Yusuf said, "just curious. We've spent so long doing things the same way, don't you think?"

"I hadn't really thought about it at all," he lied. "I didn't know you were thinking about it either."

Yusuf had the audacity to look a little bashful when he said, "For a while, it's all I've been able to think about."

"Even when we're...together?" he asked.

"Especially during." Yusuf said earnestly, hopefully, and he felt a stab of rage. The idea of Yusuf picturing someone else during sex pained him. He couldn't hold it in any longer.

"I won't say I don't understand, but you don't have to be so cruel about it. I didn't mean to react so badly, but I just couldn't help myself. The way that you were looking at the women outside the bath this morning, I just--I think about you with somebody else and it makes me feel almost sick, I get so angry. I know that it's silly. And surely, after we have been together for so long...I don't know."

"I just don't like it," he added petulantly.

As he spoke, Yusuf's face had shifted from bewilderment to surprise to amusement.

"Don't laugh at me," Nicolò said, a little frustrated.

Yusuf leaned forward and took both of Nicolò's hands in his own.

"You thought I was asking you to let me be with other people?"

"Yes," Nicolò said defensively. "Weren't you?"

Yusuf, the bastard, laughed out loud. Then he stood up and pulled at Nicolò's arm until Nicolò stood up too.

"Come with me," he said, still choking back a laugh.

Nicolò followed Yusuf deeper into the garden. People were lying down now, their bodies arranged in script-like patterns on thick rugs. Spires of tobacco smoke rose coyly through the air. As the sun set, the trees were tinged blue. Bright orange lanterns pulsed softly. Young boys rolled around on the grass, play wrestling while their parents kept score.

Yusuf was looking for something and he soon found it. He weaved through a cluster of tall, full cypress trees and disappeared.

Nicolò ducked in between two trees; the coarse foliage scratched his skin and he covered his face. He was barely through the branches before he felt Yusuf's strong hands gripping his waist.

They were in a small clearing. A pair of enormous oaks blocked them one side of the garden. The leafy cypresses covered the other side. If they crouched, they would be well-concealed. The tall garden wall loomed above them. Yusuf pulled him down into the grass.

Yusuf was laughing now and kissing at his face. His aim was wild and uncontrolled; he kissed Nicolò's eyes, his left nostril, his earlobe. He kissed everywhere he could get at.

"You're a fool," he whispered, his beard rough against Nicolò's cheek. "A sweet, sweet fool. My fool."

Nicolò wanted to be cross, but he was enjoying the attention. The trees above them formed a kind of skylight, a small strip of the darkening sky. The first stars were appearing and the air was rich with the smell of earth and plant life. He was laying flat on his back. Yusuf ran a hand up and down his side.

"I don't understand," he said.

"This morning," Yusuf whispered, "I wasn't going to ask you that. I only wanted to...change our roles. Do you know what I mean?"

He looked at Yusuf. Yusuf took one of Nicolò's hands and placed it on the small of his back, then slowly slid it down to his ass.

It was clear then, and Nicolò felt stupid and then relieved and then pleased. He placed his other hand on the back of Yusuf's head and pressed it tightly to his chest. He buried his face in Yusuf's hair and breathed deeply. He could feel his lover's body shaking with laughter.

He lifted Yusuf's head then and looked seriously into his eyes.

"If you wanted..." he said, "If you wanted to, I would-I would have to get used to it, but...I would stay. It isn't just about the sex for me, of course. It would be strange at first, but I would grow to accept it. My love for you is bigger than that and I know you, I have known you for so long. That's what I wanted to tell you."

Yusuf kissed the knuckles of his hand tenderly.

"Of course _now_ you’re magnanimous. Maybe some day, I'll want to invite someone to join us. To try, to see. But I don't have any desire to be without you. I know parts of you nobody else knows, have known you in ways nobody else has. Now, I don't want that to change."

Yusuf smiled down at him. Nicolò loved his slightly crooked bottom row of teeth, his full expressive eyebrows, the precise bow of his lip. He could see his reflection in Yusuf's eyes. He tried to imagine what he looked like, and he felt conscious of all the muscles in his face, the feel of breath on his facial hair, the trembling of his eyelashes.

He needed, now, to be looked upon by this man who loved him, to be touched by this man who loved him. It grounded him in his body. He could not be without it.

And then Yusuf kissed him again, with more intention, a probing kiss. His head fell back into the grass and his eyes closed. He felt the brush of the blades of grass against the skin of his arms, his ankles, the back of his neck.

He slid his right hand under Yusuf's tunic, feeling the hard planes of the muscle, the light dusting of hair across his chest. He felt Yusuf hard against his leg and he shifted, lining them up so that he could grind his hips upward softly. Yusuf moaned into his mouth and then chased the moan with his tongue. In the open air, everything felt new and thrilling and slightly dangerous. When he ran his hands through Yusuf's hair, he felt the leaves and grass that had collected there.

All of a sudden, a cascade of shouts rang out. Yusuf tensed above him and he strained his neck, trying to see what was happening.

"Up, up, up," Yusuf was suddenly urging him, pulling at his shirt as he scrambled to a kneeling position.

Two watchmen were marching in their direction, trailed slightly by a woman in pale green robes and a dark veil, who was pointing at them and speaking furiously. She must have seen them.

"We need to run," Yusuf said.

"We can lose them in the crowd at the festival," Nicolò said. "I'll follow you."

Yusuf grabbed his wrist and then they were running, breaking out of the tree line and heading toward the large, round gate that opened on to the street. The grass stretched out in front of them, and behind them, they heard shouting. Nicolò turned to see the two watchmen giving chase, knees pumping high, swords banging against their sides.

Yusuf's hand was hot around his. He pulled his arm, trying to break free, but Yusuf only gripped tighter.

"Yusuf," he shouted, trying to free his hand so they could run faster. Yusuf turned to look at him out of the corner of his eyes as they ran and he was smiling.

He hadn't run like this in a long time. They spent a lot of time stalking, hunting, fighting their way through inch by inch. But now they were running, careening wildly out into the busy street. Nicolò's chest burned but every breath tasted good: the raw twinge of river, the acidic smell of boza, kebabs of meat roasting, the breaking of fresh bread.

To their left, the Bosphorus murmured. The river was filled with boats of all sizes, small ferries shuffling back and forth between shores, long painted rafts with twenty oars skimming the surface like insects, big wooden barges where the pashas and their wives watched the fireworks. In the heat, a thick layer of vapor hung over the water; it blurred the lanterns and torches into wild gashes of light that cut across the edges of Nicolò's vision.

Yusuf forced his way through a pack of old men stumbling out of a coffee house after a day of backgammon and conversation. They yelled curses at him in Turkish. They ran past workshop after workshop, shuffling through clouds of scents; the musky leather of the saddlemakers, the heady scent of the bookbinders' parchment, the sharp smell of the cobblers' oils.

Their feet pounded against the uneven stone street. The houses whizzed by, merging into a streak of polished wood and dusty glass. Sometimes Yusuf would turn suddenly and Nicolò's arm would be jerked almost out of its socket but Yusuf didn't let go. At times, it felt as though their pursuers were only a few feet behind them; other times, they sounded as though they might be miles away.

Finally, they heard the buzz of the crowd. They turned the corner and were immediately inundated by a crowd of people who were, surprisingly, running the other direction.

Nicolò felt Yusuf's hands slip from his as the mass of bodies overwhelmed them. He tried to push his way through; just ahead of him, he could see Yusuf's familiar back, framed by a diverse sea of headgear, long cones and tightly packed turbans and structured fezzes in bright reds and yellows.

The Atmeydani had been used as a race track when the city was still Constantinople. Nicolò remembered the screaming of the citizens on a hot summer day, the way steam had curled off the enormous horses' backs as they dragged the chariots around the track.

The Ottomans had little interest in racing, but they used the space for festivals. In the distance, he could see the looming remnants of the circus, the enormous stone columns that ran the length of the track, the curved stadium walls with arches carved out. The elevated stage where the sultan and his family watched the festivities was empty; their colorful tasseled caravans were pulling away toward the side streets. 

But every person in the space was focusing all their attention on just one thing: an gigantic elephant was slowly and anxiously lumbering toward the edges of the open space. Just below the stage, a smaller elephant remained tied to one of the columns; the freed elephant's thick brown ropes were dragging behind it.

The elephant was almost twice as tall as a person. It was sweeping its heavy tail back and forth anxiously; its headgear, a simple, silky golden affair, was sliding off its head, tangled in one of its huge white tusks. Two handlers were trailing behind it, afraid to get too close and risk getting pushed aside. When it had been tied up, the crowd had admired it, thought of it as majestic because it made them feel strong to have tamed a majestic thing.

Now, people were screaming and running in every direction. Little children's heads popped up one by one over the crowd as their parents hoisted them up to make running easier. Scraps of fabric scraped against Nicolò's ankles and elbows dug into his sides. Vendors who sold candied fruits and honeycombs were struggling to drag their heavy carts on the uneven stone road. People hung halfway out of windows, screaming their useless advice.

Nicolò looked back. A group of panicking women had surrounded their pursuers, waving their arms wildly at the elephant. The two watchmen were now struggling to explain that they were only garden watchmen and that wrangling the world's largest land mammal was not part of their job description.

Yusuf was pushing him toward one of the small streets leading away from the plaza, but the crowd was jostling them the other direction, bodies bouncing off bodies. A group of cocky young men were playing a game, taking turns running under the elephant and avoiding its large legs.

The light from several different lanterns lit the elephant from all directions; shadows pooled in the wrinkles of the elephant's skin. Its sleepy eyes were hooded in darkness. The thin edges of its big, flapping ears had a muted glow, like a flashlight shining through a blanket. Each of its legs was as thick as a tree and its feet were cracked with dust. It looked unearthly. Every so often, it would cry out mournfully over the screaming; in the entire plaza, it was almost certainly the most frightened being.

In the distance, the nightly fireworks began to shoot off. Tonight, they were a set of sparkling teals and reds that must have looked gorgeous dappling the surface of the Bosphorus. But the loud bangs were scaring the elephant, who turned left and right, sweeping the ground with its trunk in a panic. Its handlers were calling its name over and over again. As it turned, its rear smashed into a vegetable stand, sending carrots and heads of red lettuce rolling into the street.

Suddenly, it reared its enormous head. A new wave of screams came from the crowd as the elephant lifted its enormous trunk and spewed an jet of water up into the air. Huge droplets scattered in every direction, glistening gently as they fell. Like a sudden summer rain, they splattered against the stone streets. In the warmth of the tightly-packed crowd, the water was cool and soothing against their skin.

A group of Janissary soldiers, with their tall, tufted white hats and voluminous robes, steamrolled through the crowd. They were escorting the troupe of actors who had, only moments before, been reenacting the Ottoman conquest of Cypress. The young actors in their intricately decorated military uniforms were lugging enormous enemy figurines and a full-sized cannon behind them.

The Janissaries rammed into Nicolò and Yusuf with full force and they found themselves being pushed aggressively toward the side street. Before they knew it, they were pressed up against a wooden wall, as the troupe rushed past them.

In the darkness, Nicolò reached for Yusuf's hand, but pressed up against his chest instead. He could feel Yusuf's chest heaving with laughter. The elephant cried out and the baby elephant responded, trumpeting from the distance. People were screaming and shouting and pushing and crying and in the midst of it all, Nicolò held Yusuf's hand and they laughed together.

  
Nile squinted at them.

"That story had way too much lead-up that had nothing to do with the elephant."

"We were reminiscing," Nicky said. "Just indulge us.”

Joe looked at Nicky and smirked.

"We didn't even talk about-"

"How did they catch the elephant?" Nile interrupted quickly. Though they hadn't explicitly talked about the sex, the suspicious gaps in the story certainly suggested them.

"They released a bunch of mice into the plaza," Joe said. "The elephant was so scared that it just curled up and they tied it up again."

Nile squinted harder. Or she closed her eyes in exhaustion, it was sort of hard to tell.

"We don't know," Nicky said. "We left."

"There was a loose elephant running through the city and you didn't stay to see what happened to it?"

"We had other plans," Joe said. He looked at Nicky and the desire in his eyes was as clear, as transparent, as the first time. On second thought, maybe he did have some "game", Nicky reflected.

"Alright, I'm going to leave. Give me ten minutes to grab my coat," Nile said, shuddering. "You know you guys are old enough to be my great-great-great-great-gre-"

"Only in spirit," Nicky called to her as she walked into her bedroom. Joe was stalking across the kitchen toward him.

"No, literally!" Nile shouted back. She bent to pick up her coat, and then froze when she heard the loud screech of a chair and some muted fumbling, followed by a solid thump of a back against a wall.

"I actually think I'm just gonna stay here in my room and listen to some loud music!" she yelled as she frantically reached for her headphones. She didn't wait for a response.

  
Yusuf sat on the bed, legs crossed, naked. His hair was still damp from the elephant's spray. He rubbed his ankle, a little anxious.

Nicolò came back into the room with a jug of water and a small carafe of oil. Setting the jug on the ground near the bed, he kicked off his shoes and came to sit across from Yusuf, mirroring his pose.

"You want to," Nicolò said.

"I want to," Yusuf said back.

Nicolò smiled at him, a smile that began beatific and ended filthy. He leaned forward and kissed Yusuf firmly, while slowly pulling him into a reclining position.

Nicolò's tongue was warm and wet in Yusuf's mouth. It was easy and familiar and he fell into the rhythm right away. He reached down to pull Nicolò's shirt over his head, then began to tug at his trousers. Nicolò's hands were everywhere, running along his back, gripping his chin, tangling in his hair. Then they settled on Yusuf's ass, and Nicolò pulled tightly as he rolled them over.

He kissed tenderly down Yusuf's chest, starting from the neck and moving slowly, attentively. Yusuf ran his hands through his hair, pulling gently. When he reached Yusuf's waist, he pressed his face into the divot of Yusuf's hip, breathing the familiar smell in deeply.

He got up and retrieved the oil. He felt Yusuf's admiring eyes on him from the bed. He flexed his muscles briefly as he pours some oil onto his hands, and Yusuf laughed. Nicolò liked the way that, naked, he could see how Yusuf laughed with his whole body, his legs tensing, his stomach heaving.

He came back to the bed. He kissed at Yusuf's hipbone and then took his cock into his mouth. Yusuf's was big and it grew thicker at the base, which hurt Nicolò's jaw pleasantly. He was tricky with pain, in that he liked to inflict it upon himself most; to strain to take more of it, to feel the choking reflex shoot up the back of his spine and to push himself further. Yusuf tasted salty; precum was leaking out from backside of his dick and it pooled in his mouth, between his teeth and tongue.

Yusuf moaned. He could feel Nicolò's hand beginning to reach around, so he tried to focus on the sensation of Nicolò's mouth on him and stay loose. When Nicolò's fingers found their target though, he still tensed all over. His fingers were cool and slick and feel very alien. He didn't press in right away, but instead rubbed gently around the edges.

For a brief moment, Yusuf marveled at the fact that Nicolò was simultaneously delivering a high-quality blowjob and executing a flanking maneuver on his rear. Then Nicolò's ring finger pushed into him and he stopped thinking.

He tried to be loose. He remembered fingering Nicolò on the days when he was anxious, the way he'd worried about whether he could pull his finger back out. But Nicolo's finger was wet and cold and not at all like when he had tried to finger himself. Nicolò dug deeper and deeper as he licked a long stripe up the right side of Yusuf's cock. He was using his left hand to jerk Yusuf off now. The three disparate sensations, which were occuring simultaneously, merged one another jarring in his mind.

The second finger went in much more smoothly. Experimentally, he spread his two fingers and Yusuf gripped the bedsheet with both hands. He felt as though he were being forced open but the feeling was strangely pleasurable and his cock gave an interested twitch. Nicolò was fully massaging his insides now, moving his fingers around slowly inside him.

Nicolò's finger brushed up against what felt to Yusuf like it must be his stomach, given how deep it was. A ripple of pleasure spread up his body like a wildfire. Nicolò, mouth halfway down his cock, paused then, and then pressed up against it more firmly, moving his finger in a circular motion.

He barely had the foresight to tap the bed in warning before he came, his cock spasming in the warmth of Nicolò's mouth.

Nicolò choked in surprise and bent over, coughing dramatically. He let out a few exaggerated dry heaves for good measure, then stood up and grinned. Yusuf smiled back at him. He knew that Nicolò was being goofy because he was worried that Yusuf might be nervous, which made him nervous. Yusuf felt a rush of affection.

He felt distinctly empty. He could tell that his ass was still somewhat loose. Though he had come, he wasn't satisfied.

Nicolò had his cock in his right hand and he looked down at it uncertainly, jerking it a few times lazily.

"Just do it," Yusuf said. "I want you to."

"Sometimes it's harder for me after I finish," Nicolò said, "to let someone in."

"Just try," Yusuf said.

His body was loose, but the moment Nicolò pressed up against him, it tensed up again. The forward thrust was manageable. Nicolò let out a small moan as he entered. He pushed in slowly. He kissed along Yusuf's jaw, murmuring encouragement. His cock seemed to go on forever.

"Halfway," Nicolò said at some point, but the second half felt even longer than the first.

Eventually, he bottomed out. After a moment, he found that he kind of liked it. Nicolò's body was everywhere, coating every part of his body like the bath house's steam. He felt that he was drowning in it and he liked that.

The moment Nicolò began to pull back, he felt a immediate, instinctive panic. Every nerve in his body told him that he was defecating and he felt himself clenching around Nicolò reflexively, his body closing itself the way it did when he had to hold an excretion in. It was an unpleasant visual to have in that moment. 

"Slow," he gasped out and Nicolò stopped moving. 

"We can use more oil," he said as he ran a hand through Yusuf's hair.

"It's ok," Yusuf said. He breathed deeply through his nose. He tried to tell himself he wasn't defecating. His body insisted that he was.

On the second thrust, the sensation faded slightly. With each thrust, Yusuf found himself relaxing. Though the feeling was strange, it wasn't explicitly unpleasant. He felt full, Nicolò was moaning softly now and he could feel Nicolò's cock pulsing inside of him, steady like a heartbeat. 

He looked ahead to his future and decided that if Nicolò was enjoying it, perhaps he could put up with something like this every once in a while.

But somewhere between the ninth and tenth thrusts, Nicolò adjusted his hips and when he pushed himself back in, he pressed right up against Yusuf's prostate again.

The sensation was bodily, and yet non-local. It began like a phantom itch, the kind that your mind can't locate on your physical body. He distinctly felt it spread through him, running down his chest and spreading over his extremities; he felt it on every nerve ending, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. It felt unbelievably good. 

Being fingered had been pleasant; this was different, the way he felt full and warm and vital. The sense of Nicolò holding him open; he felt it not only where they were touching but in his whole body.

He groaned and dug his fingers into Nicolò's back. He could feel Nicolò grinning against his temple.

"Again?" he asked, almost teasingly, only the head of his cock still inside Yusuf.

"Again," Yusuf said frantically, slapping him on the back with his open hand.

Nicolò slid in again, brushing against that same spot. Then on the next thrust, he pistoned his hips and pushed with his legs, slamming himself in hard. Yusuf opened his mouth but no sound came out. Every muscle in his body was tensed, but instead of pushing Nicolò out, now his body was pulling him in, clinging to him with every fibre.

Yusuf was fully hard again. Nicolò had set a pace now, was steadily pounding at Yusuf's prostate with deliberate strokes. He felt unbelievably large; everytime he pushed forward, Yusuf felt as though he was being stretched even wider. He had one hand on his own cock and he was jerking erratically; every few seconds he would lose himself in the sensation and forget to keep moving his hand.

He felt the climax building like a whiteness that enclosed his vision. Nicolò's arms had given out. Pressed chest to chest, Nicolò was burning up against his skin. They were kissing, sloppily and with no sense of control. Nicolò was sucking on his bottom lip.

"I love you," he said, urgently, hoarsely, into his lover's mouth.

"Yes," Nicolò said. "I love you."

He hooked both legs around Nicolò's back and pulled and Nicolò felt deeper inside him than any time before and as though the floor were falling out beneath him, he came, without warning. In the whiteness of his orgasm he felt the shaking of Nicolò's body. By the time he came back to earth, he could feel something warm and liquid inside him. His lover was sliding himself out.

They laid side-by-side for what felt like hours but must have only been a few minutes. He was unbearably conscious of where they touched; Nicolò's elbow against his side, their ankles entangled. In the after-high, he felt as though he were settling back into his own body; he noticed the sense of his muscle straining under skin, the fabric of the bed against his back, the coolness of the night air.

After some time, Nicolò got up and went to get a washcloth. He came and wiped Yusuf down and Yusuf thought about the first time, and the time this morning, and the many times in between. He though about how many times he must have forgotten, but he knew that the remnants were still in his bones; he felt it in the overwhelming sense of familiarity and security that came over him every time he touched Nicolò.

"A blushing virgin no more," Nicolò said with a snicker.

Yusuf punched him lightly on the shoulder, then wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled him close.

"It was good," he said softly and Nicolò, reassured, ran a finger up his arm in a way that meant thank you. Then he got up to clean himself.

The sounds of the parade were pulling closer and closer. Every night this week musicians had collected at the market, playing loud music for the community. He could hear children shouting at one another. Doors slammed open and closed. He heard the clinking of money and clatter of feet against stones. And above it all, people singing in high clear voices, the banging of drums, the keening fiddles, the playful whistles of flutes.

Yusuf wrapped a sheet around his waist and stood up. Nicolò had his back turned to him, wiping himself off. Framed in the teal light of the window, his silhouette was strong and proud. He drank from the jug and Yusuf admired the way his throat looked when he swallowed. 

"Dance with me," he said.

Nicolò looked at him and laughed.

"You can't look at me that way when I'm naked and you're only wearing a bedsheet," he said. "We look ridiculous, not romantic at all."

Even in the darkness, he must have looked like a sop. He didn't care much.

After a second, Nicolò padded over to him. He wrapped one arm around the younger man's waist and pulled him close. Slotting his face against Nicolò's neck, he took Nicolò's other hand in his. They had seen peasants dancing this way, scandalously close, outside Vienna. Now, in the half-light, they rocked back and forth, and Yusuf sang softly into his lover's ear.

He could feel each of Nicolò's breaths running along his neck. The other man's palm was damp with sweat. He smelled like flesh and come and their olive oil soap. His lower back was sticky against Yusuf's skin. His chest pressed against Yusuf's every time he inhaled. Their knees brushed gently against each other. 

Long after the music faded away, they continued to sway, leaning into one another in the darkness. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, no disrespect was meant, take all cultural representations with a grain of salt, but definitely please reach out if anything bothers you or is incorrect. I will address ASAP or take it down if there are issues.
> 
> I don't know why the elephant is even in the story at this point, I just thought it was funny.
> 
> In 1582, the circumcision festival of Mehmed III really did involve a elephant on the loose. You can read more here:  
> https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/a-social-history-of-ottoman-istanbul/the-palace-and-the-populace/1491381D7B25C36A7A14AD870D79D9FF
> 
> And here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1523225?seq=1
> 
> The bath description was based off this case study about the Çemberlitaş Hamamı: https://www.academia.edu/2399287/Bathing_Business_in_Istanbul_A_Case_Study_of_the_%C3%87emberlita%C5%9F_Hamam%C4%B1_in_the_Seventeenth_and_Eighteenth_Centuries
> 
> Make Nicolò (Niccolò? Two C's?) Vers Again.
> 
> I always really appreciate comments and feedback; I love hearing what you liked/what I could do better. I want to keep updating but I'm pretty busy so I'm not sure when I will post again. If you'd like to be updated when/if I add more, subscribe.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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